Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
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From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Subject: Re: SmalltalkAgents vs. VisualAge
Message-ID: <tcmayD0tJ9E.MzE@netcom.com>
Organization: Cypherpunks
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Date: Wed, 14 Dec 1994 20:51:14 GMT
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JUrquhart (jurquhart@aol.com) wrote:
: I'm just curious; why is there so little discussion of VisualAge and IBM
: Smalltalk in this group?  There seems to be much more discussion of
: SmalltalkAgents (albeit, much of it from QKS employees), which is also
: currently running on very few platforms.

: p.s.  I have already been in touch with QKS and IBM, so no marketing
: types, please.

I'd also be happy to see more VisualAge discussion, but it pretty much
has to come from their customers, or even their own folks.

I don't mind the many comments from QKS folks here....it tells me
they're reading this group and IBM's people probably aren't.

Another reason is pricing and advertising: SmalltalkAgents is not a
huge investment--I paid $500, which I consider in line with what
language tools and compilers _ought_ to cost. (And I'm a Mac user,
which also affects things.) 

And for this $500 I've gotten an amazing development environment to
play around in, two CD-ROMs so far (in two months), an active
discussion list on the STA-Forum, and the heavy involvement of at
least 4-5 QKS technical people in the discussions. This contrasts
rather sharply with my Digitalk Smalltalk/V experiences, where there
was effectively no communication with the home office, except for an
occasional newsletter/brochure that was heavy on offering training
classes, and one offer of an upgrade to Version 2.0, which I declined
to pay for after hearing about bugs and performance problems.

So, SmalltalkAgents is going the high visibility route, apparently
patterned after the Metrowerks CodeWarrior model. Reasonable prices,
lots of updates, but not a lot of the "$5000 for two days" corporate
training classes. Seems like a good approach to me.

(On why so little VisualAge discussion here, I don't even know what
VisualAge/VisualSmalltalk costs, for example. I've heard it only runs
on OS/2 for now (true?), which may help to explain its limited market
at present. I wouldn't mind at all having their marketing or technical
folks participating here.)

And with SmalltalkAgents coming to Windows95 and Unix platforms, we
may see a whole lot more discussion here about it.

--Tim May
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