What Smalltalk can Learn from Ruby
First talk of the morning - Stephen Baker's "What Smalltalk can learn from Ruby". He's starting with a brief overview of how we got from the state of the industry in the early 90's to where we are now. I have my own notions on this topic, as many of you already know :)
Anyway, here he is getting started:
So if Smalltalk is so great, why do we have so many problems getting traction? Here's what Ruby has:
- Low barriers to entry
- A blog in 15 minutes
- Community - so screencasts (etc) got immediate traction
I think the main take away from this talk is that we have great tools and web frameworks in Smalltalk, but we don't make it easy enough for people to get into the community.
