Squeak Smalltalk 'goodness'

I sometimes tell my tech-friends that if I did not have to earn a living, then I might spend all my time in Squeak. I would use Smalltalk more, but requests for consulting work always come for Java, Lisp, and Ruby. Torsten talks about some great new UI tools that will be donated back to the open source Squeak community. Squeak is a very fine platform, and projects like Seaside and Open Croquet will not be the last high visibility projects we see built on Squeak.

Comments

  1. Unknown10:15 AM

    Mark, I can appreciate your situation regarding Seaside since I to have a previous experience with Smalltalk. My current work emphasis is in Ruby on Rails. As a contractor I seek out ROR work. When consulting, most clients do not know the difference between the langauges. Most do not even ask for source code, just get it working. As far as ROR goes, ROR does affect hosting but even this is getting more transparent since CPanel now includes ROR.

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  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant10:26 AM

    Hello Rich,

    Deploying small Ruby on Rails applications is easy - getting easier when hosting companies like RimuHosting.com offer Linux VPS options that are all set up. I really like Ruby as a language, but sometimes the slow performance keeps me from using it for general purpose calculations. On the other hand, RoR applications rely on a lot of native code (apache, lighttpd, Ferret, libraries for hash tabes, external database servers, etc.) so performance is often not an issue.

    Enjoy your work with RoR :-)

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