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From: rfenney@netcom.com (Robert J. Fenney)
Subject: Re: Yourdan's recent article on SM
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Date: Sat, 13 Apr 1996 19:04:27 GMT
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Ed makes a living telling everyone that will listen how to design systems.
I learned his methodologies in college and have follwed since. One thing
most people don't realize is that Ed has not worked on a development
project (that I know of) in years. I don't think that he has more that a
very cursory experience with any of the tools that he talks about. Like
most speakers I think he is right some times and wroung most of the time.
When it comes to Smalltalk going away all I have to say is that it wont
happen unless the venders give up and I think you would just see new tool
providers filling the void. C++ is good for somethings but it is just
becoming to big. It tries to be everytime to everyone and ends up leaving
a bad taste in my mouth. VB and PowerBuild just do not hold up on medium
to large projects and don't think about multi-tierd or fully distributed
projects or projects with more that 1 to 3 programmers. Java is to new and
there are no tools as of yet maybe in 2 years we will see, until then it
is a great tool for Inter/Intranet development. Smalltalk holds it's own
for now and I still don't see any development environment replacing it.

In article <4kk95s$3am2@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net>, skykeys@ibm.net wrote:

> Has anyone read Ed Yourdan's recent (April 96) article 
> in Application Development Strategies intitled "The Future of Smalltalk"? 
> I thought the article would have raised a few eyebrows by now.  
> 
> For those who have not read it, he essentially says that Smalltalk's
time has come
> and gone.  (slight oversimplification here)    Though he thinks it is
still possible for
> Smalltalk to take a bigger slice of the pie, he just doesn't see it
happening.  He 
> thinks it's more likely that Smalltalk will place 5th or 6th behind VB,
Powerbuilder 
> Delphi and C++.  He doesn't like the market consolidating around IBM and
ParcPlace. 
> He sees the recent happenings of Java and Delphi as signs that Smalltalk
missed
> the boat.   IBM's notoriously slow product development along with their
pathetic
> marketing efforts have doomed Smalltalk to continued small niche
status.   He does
> however like the general direction IBM has taken with technical
developments of
> Visual Age.   He just thinks it's too little too late.   
> 
> Does anyone have any opinions on this matter one way or the other? 
> 
> Regards,
> Lou  (my opinions don't really matter to anyone anyway)
