Few thoughts about Google Summer of Code
… and observations …and questions … mostly inspired by GSoC Mentor Summit
- Mentor Summit was a great event! I didn't expect it to be THIS :) Very
pleasant …and very hard for me: so many people, language and culture shock
:) Great experience for me personally. Thank ESUG for choosing and sending
me there. - Bad news: Smalltalk is not popular. Well, it's not that new actually,
we know it. But I didn't manage to fix it :) Seriously: actually, it looks
like everybody knows Smalltalk (they know it existed I mean; few knows it
still exists), but it is treated like a black and white movie. People say
"wow! it's cool" and go to see Avatar. :( So developers don't take Smalltalk
seriously. We (Smalltalkers) know it's a mistake. But we have to show that
for others. And I found myself unable to do that there. I found language
and, more likely, culture barrier is too big to overcome. I didn't manage to
set up a two-way communication with others. So I listened mostly. - And I've heard many interesting ideas… apparently, organizational
ideas mostly. I need some time to process them. So, for now I'll just
outline some directions… - Did we summarize our GSoC results? I thought I've missed them, but
apparently we didn't do it. At least I found only this page
http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2010-esug/downloads/list.
I didn't care much before, but now I think it is very important to look
closer at the projects we did within GSoC, understand where we succeeded;
where we failed; did we benefit and could we get more; make some plans for
the future... etc. - I think we should pay more attention to GSoC. It is very important for
our small society. Of course, we can't be sure smalltalkers will be invited
again next year. (One of the things I tried to understand at summit but
still I don't: how does Google select mentor organizations?) But this work
will be very helpful, useful, advantageous… what ever. - We should be more serious about monitoring and controlling our
projects. Since money are involved here, we have a right to. That's money
from Google, but still. I think it should be a bit different from the way
free projects are evolved within Smalltalk society. Since we have such
opportunity we have to benefit as much as we can. - Smalltalk gives me competitive advantages. For that matter I don't
want to :) but now I understand even better: we have to promote Smalltalk.
I know everybody knows that, but I still want to state it once again. And
promoting is not only about advertising and praising. We should be more
open. We should find a way to start some cooperative projects with other
societies/languages. I don't know how to do it. And it's extremely hard for
me as I believe in Smalltalk superiority :) But still we have if we don't
want Smalltalk to die. In general, it looks like making Smalltalk more open
should be our priority, and this is one of the few ways to enhance prestige
of Smalltalk among developers.
--
Dennis Schetinin
On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 10:41 AM, Dennis Schetinin chaetal@gmail.com wrote:
… and observations …and questions … mostly inspired by GSoC Mentor Summit
Mentor Summit was a great event! I didn't expect it to be THIS :) Very
pleasant …and very hard for me: so many people, language and culture shock
:) Great experience for me personally. Thank ESUG for choosing and sending
me there.
Bad news: Smalltalk is not popular. Well, it's not that new actually, we
know it. But I didn't manage to fix it :) Seriously: actually, it looks like
everybody knows Smalltalk (they know it existed I mean; few knows it still
exists), but it is treated like a black and white movie. People say "wow!
it's cool" and go to see Avatar. :( So developers don't take Smalltalk
seriously. We (Smalltalkers) know it's a mistake. But we have to show that
for others. And I found myself unable to do that there. I found language
and, more likely, culture barrier is too big to overcome. I didn't manage to
set up a two-way communication with others. So I listened mostly.
And I've heard many interesting ideas… apparently, organizational ideas
mostly. I need some time to process them. So, for now I'll just outline some
directions…
Hi Dennis,
thank you for you nice report !
You are totally right ... i have the same problem when i meet
developers from other languages.
It's very difficult to change the mind of people. I have no real
answer except continue do some cool stuff and make more noise.
Regards,
--
Serge Stinckwich
UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC), Hanoi, Vietnam
Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
http://doesnotunderstand.org/
You are totally right ... i have the same problem when i meet
developers from other languages. It's very difficult to change the
mind of people. I have no real answer except continue do some cool
stuff and make more noise.
I betcha this is a two way street. What would we see in a Smalltalker
from the point of view of, say, C? Would we think we can change the
Smalltalker's mind?
I remember Stephane and others commenting several times that appearance
is an issue, and that we need a nicer looking UI. Is this really the
main selling factor these days, or does that apply mostly to students (I
phrase it this way because I remember Stef making the comment
specifically with respect to students)?
Andres.
Valloud, Andres wrote:
... I remember Stephane and others commenting several times that
appearance is an issue, and that we need a nicer looking UI. Is this
really the main selling factor these days, or does that apply mostly to
students? ...
Its not just appearance Andres, it's the complete User eXperience:
intuitiveness, ease of use, productivity, fun factor as well as the look and
feel. A lot of progress has already been made in this area, but there is
still a long way to go because most Smalltalk IDE's have not evolved that
much since the 70's ... that's probably part of why Smalltalk is being
treated like a black and white movie :)
--
View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Few-thoughts-about-Google-Summer-of-Code-tp3018404p3018591.html
Sent from the ESUG mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
Its not just appearance Andres, it's the complete User eXperience:
intuitiveness, ease of use, productivity, fun factor as well as the look and
feel. A lot of progress has already been made in this area, but there is
still a long way to go because most Smalltalk IDE's have not evolved that
much since the 70's ... that's probably part of why Smalltalk is being
treated like a black and white movie :)
But see, I'm already sold, so I just don't see the point :)... IMO, we
will make the most progress in this area by concentrating our efforts on
the difficult problems. It makes me happy to see people concerned with
how to make an image from scratch, for example.
Andres.
Thanks Dennis for this detailed feedback. It's important to keep the community informed.
On 29 oct. 2010, at 05:41, Dennis Schetinin wrote:
We should be more open. We should find a way to start some cooperative projects with other societies/languages.
[...]
In general, it looks like making Smalltalk more open should be our priority, and this is one of the few ways to enhance prestige of Smalltalk among developers.
I fully agree. There are multiple directions to go.
-Applications : We should develop cool applications that target domains that interest users (e.g. mobile applications, web). The look and feel/ user experience is important to have some impact. A recent really cool example is the Event Planning System developed by the belgian company Inceptive. We need to advertise more such applications to the outside of the community. The on-line videos and slides, blogs and the awards are made for this. Still we need more advertisements in places where we can
-GUI : This is coupled with the previous item. We need native widgets. Smalltalk developers should be able to applications that comply with the appearance of other applications. Projects such as MARS (Smalltalk software with Mac OS X widgets) is an example.
-Programming environments : I love the Smalltalk IDE. Still, many developers don't want to change their programming habit. May be not from the beginning. We should be able to develop Smalltalk in an text editor. This was done in GNU Smalltalk and there is also the CORAL initiative. The effort need to be continued.
-Standard/Mainstream protocols, libraries, and infrastructures. We need to provide a bridge to all important pieces of software (e.g. OpenGL). Web frameworks such as Seaside, Aida are definitely a great step in this direction.
-Documentation : Both on-line and paper articles and books. Code examples are important. People new to Smalltalk should quickly find some code to copy/paste and test.
To sum up, there are already different actions. Still, we need to do more. If you have ideas share them with us. Spending a little of your time in one of these actions would be beneficial to everyone.
Noury
Hi Dennis, Geert, Adres, Serge and other commenters..
I used to teach information systems at the University of Cape Town,
where final year students do an industry project.
I visited their project demonstration expo yesterday as a a guest. I
last taught there in 2003, and on that course around 2000, so it is just
ten years since the last projects I supervised directly. What saddened
me was that the projects had great looking UI's and most were available
as both desktop and web applications, but the fundamental functionality,
integrity, sophistication of systems and thought in design was actually
at a lower standard than we had a decade ago. I even saw interfaces
where it would require software changes to add a new product category,
for example. The new shininess is largely due to the use of new tools
such as Visual Studio, Web Frameworks (think JQuery, ExtJs etc. ) and
new browser and OS skins (Chrome / Windows 7 etc. ).
Unfortunately, like when meeting someone, or dating, first impressions
count. Students (and many commercial developers and their managers who
hold budgets) are impressed by shiny new toys. If these are proffered by
professional looking marketing people at fancy functions at apparently
successful companies (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle..) then they are all the
more impressed. People like computer scientists and modelers who are
trying to solve fundamental problems, get the data structures right, get
the algorithms right etc. are far more likely to look past the gloss and
glitz and appreciate the power and capabilities of a language like
Smalltalk.
So, what to do? I think there are a number of good things we can
leverage, and some ideas:
* Push the variants of Smalltalk that _do_ look good - these include
Pharo, VisualWorks on the desktop, Dolphin etc.
* Show the power of the IDEs and contrast these with the clumsy
bulkiness of something like Eclipse. Here we must be careful,
because there are other very slick products out there, including
Visual Studio (it _is_ very pretty :| )
* Push the web capable variants (pretty much all the Smalltalks with
Seaside or Aida) - many people are surprised at how well Smalltalk
"does" web
* Show developers the power of the language - especially the ability
to create a "domain friendly" language at a level of abstraction
that reduces the code required for solutions dramatically
* Create literature and make it widely available on project success
stories and language productivity (properly measured - e.g.
function points per staff month)
Interestingly, I recently was exposed to a large and "successful"
Java project in an assurance environment. When we measured the
developer productivity, it was about 25% lower than we were
getting with mainframe COBOL in the late '70s!
* And some ideas:
o Link Smalltalk to "sexy" topics that have current mindshare
- e.g. CloudFork is a good example.
o I would like to see a GSOC project to address semantic
triple store capabilities and a sematic web application of
these - think Freebase
o Doing good UI's is still quite hard and labour intensive -
Seaside provides a great framework, but we are still working
pretty much at the level of HTML / CSS concepts. I would
like to see a layer describing logical data structures e.g.
List, Tree, Matrix, Document (sequenced set of objects),
Model (spatially arranged and possibly connected objects)
and a visual editor (or very high level DSL) that allows
composition of these into user interfaces with a publish /
subscribe event model and choice of suitable controls and
widgets based upon the logical data type. (this one is
probably a bit too big for a GSOC but may be tackled in
pieces. )
o We should also try to put together really rich / capable
development images which are easily accessible / one click
install and still small enough to be grasped reasonably
easily by someone new to the environment. These could
include tools like: pharo, sunit, seaside, (some easy clean
persistence layer), magritte, pier, swakom, moose, glamour
on steroides (see previous point). Maybe integrating these
tools and providing a nice dashboard could be another good
GSOC target..
Hope some of this makes sense.
Welcome feedback and comments.
Best regards,
Graham
Dennis Schetinin wrote:
… and observations …and questions … mostly inspired by GSoC Mentor Summit
1. Mentor Summit was a great event! I didn't expect it to be THIS
:) Very pleasant …and very hard for me: so many people, language
and culture shock :) Great experience for me personally. Thank
ESUG for choosing and sending me there.
2. Bad news: Smalltalk is not popular. Well, it's not that new
actually, we know it. But I didn't manage to fix it :)
Seriously: actually, it looks like everybody knows Smalltalk
(they know it existed I mean; few knows it still exists), but it
is treated like a black and white movie. People say "wow! it's
cool" and go to see Avatar. :( So developers don't take
Smalltalk seriously. We (Smalltalkers) know it's a mistake. But
we have to show that for others. And I found myself unable to do
that there. I found language and, more likely, culture barrier
is too big to overcome. I didn't manage to set up a two-way
communication with others. So I listened mostly.
3. And I've heard many interesting ideas… apparently,
organizational ideas mostly. I need some time to process them.
So, for now I'll just outline some directions…
4. Did we summarize our GSoC results? I thought I've missed them,
but apparently we didn't do it. At least I found only this page
http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2010-esug/downloads/list.
I didn't care much before, but now I think it is very important
to look closer at the projects we did within GSoC, understand
where we succeeded; where we failed; did we benefit and could we
get more; make some plans for the future... etc.
5. I think we should pay more attention to GSoC. It is very
important for our small society. Of course, we can't be sure
smalltalkers will be invited again next year. (One of the things
I tried to understand at summit but still I don't: how does
Google select mentor organizations?) But this work will be very
helpful, useful, advantageous… what ever.
6. We should be more serious about monitoring and controlling our
projects. Since money are involved here, we have a right to.
That's money from Google, but still. I think it should be a bit
different from the way free projects are evolved within
Smalltalk society. Since we have such opportunity we have to
benefit as much as we can.
7. Smalltalk gives me competitive advantages. For that matter I
don't want to :) but now I understand even better: we have to
promote Smalltalk. I know everybody knows that, but I still want
to state it once again. And promoting is not only about
advertising and praising. We should be more open. We should find
a way to start some cooperative projects with other
societies/languages. I don't know how to do it. And it's
extremely hard for me as I believe in Smalltalk superiority :)
But still we have if we don't want Smalltalk to die. In general,
it looks like making Smalltalk more open should be our priority,
and this is one of the few ways to enhance prestige of Smalltalk
among developers.
--
Dennis Schetinin
Esug-list mailing list
Esug-list@lists.esug.org
http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org
-Standard/Mainstream protocols, libraries, and infrastructures. We
need to provide a bridge to all important pieces of software (e.g.
OpenGL).
With respect to bridging to other languages in particular, we need to be
careful not to impose a Smalltalk POV on things that are not Smalltalk.
For instance, the community of the "foreign" language targeted by an
FFI is not going to be impressed by our efforts if they see their
language misrepresented or misunderstood. This is only fair, if some
other language wrote an FFI into Smalltalk, we wouldn't like this other
FFI to misrepresent Smalltalk either.
People like computer scientists and modelers who are trying to solve
fundamental problems, get the data structures right, get the algorithms
right etc. are far more likely to look past the gloss and glitz and
appreciate the power and capabilities of a language like Smalltalk.
Yes, and in some areas I think we could be doing a better job at
promoting Smalltalk to those people.
What saddened me was that the projects had great looking UI's and
most were available as both desktop and web applications, but the
fundamental functionality, integrity, sophistication of systems and
thought in design was actually at a lower standard than we had a decade ago.
I hope we manage to stay as far away from that as possible, for
otherwise we would not be leveraging Smalltalk's advantages when dealing
with difficult problems. And it's hard to ignore people who
consistently deal with difficult problems successfully...
Andres.
Noury Bouraqadi-2 wrote:
-Applications : We should develop cool applications that target domains
that interest users (e.g. mobile applications, web). The look and feel/
user experience is important to have some impact. A recent really cool
example is the Event Planning System developed by the belgian company
Inceptive...
+1
Noury Bouraqadi-2 wrote:
-Programming environments : I love the Smalltalk IDE. Still, many
developers don't want to change their programming habit. ...
Smalltalkers do love their powerful IDE, but to the average newcomer it is -
compared to other IDE's these days - certainly far from being intuitive.
Noury Bouraqadi-2 wrote:
-Documentation : Both on-line and paper articles and books. Code examples
are important. People new to Smalltalk should quickly find some code to
copy/paste and test.
Yes, I reckon a better, easier to use project/code sharing infrastructure
(replacing SqueakSource) is required with more useful educational sample
projects.
View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Few-thoughts-about-Google-Summer-of-Code-tp3018404p3018677.html
Sent from the ESUG mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Andres Valloud avalloud@cincom.com wrote:
Its not just appearance Andres, it's the complete User eXperience:
intuitiveness, ease of use, productivity, fun factor as well as the look
and
feel. A lot of progress has already been made in this area, but there is
still a long way to go because most Smalltalk IDE's have not evolved that
much since the 70's ... that's probably part of why Smalltalk is being
treated like a black and white movie :)
But see, I'm already sold, so I just don't see the point :)... IMO, we will
make the most progress in this area by concentrating our efforts on the
difficult problems. It makes me happy to see people concerned with how to
make an image from scratch, for example.
As someone who spends much of my time dealing with Smalltalk users,
customers, and prospects, I can say that it does matter to most
people. Solving difficult problems is a very valuable thing to do, but
without doing it in an environment that is broadly appealing
(visually, UX, etc. as Geert says) Smalltalk will never have any
chance of being more than a tiny niche (think of WinAmp or VLC -
neither would have been successful without attractive, intuitive user
interfaces, even though the real reason I used/use them was for the
really practical features).
Julian