StS 2007 Daily: Smalltalk Panel
The final event on Tuesday will be the Smalltalk Panel:
Anyone who is interested is welcome to attend and participate. Members from each of the STIC Board Member organizations will be available to talk to new members and those interested in find out more about STIC. The meeting will be moderated by Bob Nemec, the Executive Director of STIC.
Panel members are: Monty Williams from GemStone, Suzanne Fortman from Cincom, Ed Klimas from Instantiations and David Buck, an independent consultant.
A panel discussion on the issues of marketing Smalltalk to the decision makers, typically non-technical management that needs to balance the costs and benefits of selecting any development tool. Most Smalltalk advocacy material talks about the technical benefits: how you can build complex applications with less effort if everything is an object. But how do we prove this? How do convince a typically risk-averse manager that using a niche language like Smalltalk can provide competitive advantages that out-weigh the risks
See you in Toronto!
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
Comments
A suggestion.....
[Anonymous Coward] April 19, 2007 20:06:46.236
Maybe some Smalltalk programmers ought to consider being promoted to management. They should climb the management ladder until they have the power to dictate what language to use. It is probably hard to do since Smalltalkers don't want to quit programming and become managers.
Also, consider looking at Paul Graham's excellent blogs about LISP and Viaweb. His stuff might have some ideas. Oh, and always accentuate the positive.
Dilbert Principle
[Troy Brumley] April 19, 2007 20:36:30.753
@anonymous, your suggestion couldn't happen in the real world. Smalltalkers are productive and get things done. Now, according to Dilbert, in order to get promoted you have to be unproductive and actually a danger at a lower level, and people keep promoting you until you can no longer do any harm (tactically). Of course, that approach has the unintended consequence of putting these nimrods in a position to block the decisions of those who can be productive.