Friday, 20 May 2011

User group marketing

The Toronto Smalltalk User Group has been active for 20 years. At our peak we had about 45 people attending meetings. Lately we've averaged about a dozen.

What can we do to get more people to attend?

I suspect we already know all Smalltalkers in the Greater Toronto Area, if not personally then by just one level of separation. Our best bet is to target new people that may have an interest. We've had some success with Ryerson students. The two professors that sponsor our group encourage the students that take their OO course to attend. It has some Smalltalk content (Pharo) and a couple of students have come out.

Some of the TSUG crowd have attended XP Toronto events. They have regular meetings, pair programming pub nights and they organize well run Agile conferences. Those that know about Smalltalk respect it because of XP's roots, but they tend to be surprised that it's still an active language.

Yanni Chiu has been something of  a TSUG ambassador, representing Smalltalk at things like the "Dynamic Languages Smack Down". He and Chris Cunnington signed up for Toronto Startup Weekend and plan to show some Seaside app. I had some tentative plans to talk to the Durham Ruby group (something I need to follow up on).

Whenever it's appropriate I hand out TSUG pamphlets. They list all the Smalltalk dialects, web frameworks and projects I know of. I print off a new batch for each TSUG meeting, with updated meeting schedules and conference information (ESUG in in the current one). It's an MS Publisher document which I print off on heavier stock paper which has a light blue tint. Here is what part of it looks like...


I'd love to get suggestions on how to promote the group.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers makes the point that people with very high IQs are not more likely to be successful than people with just 'good' IQs (120, evidently). Once you're smart enough, other factors like people skills and communication skills make the difference.  Smalltalk has an IQ above 180, the other tools are probably in the 120 range. Smalltalk needs to work on its people and communication skills.

Tuesday, 3 May 2011

Pushing Smalltalk

The next meeting of the Toronto Smalltalk User Group is May 9 with Don MacQueen talking about JWARS.
See the web site for details.

I've been involved with the Toronto Smalltalk User Group for 20 years now, the past dozen or so as the primary organizer. Lately we've had a few people show up that were new to Smalltalk and wanted to learn more. We talk to them about the simple syntax, show them Pharo and Seaside, tell them about the other dialects, and try whatever we can to get them enthused.

But there is one core strength that I value which I cannot easily demo: the lack of brick walls.

When working with tools like MS's Visual Studio, I'm constantly frustrated by the lack of universal object inspection and 'down to primitive' code tracking. Coding something new and with unfamiliar APIs gets a bit messy. You don't always know what you need until you trip over its absence. I find myself adding diagnostic code to show me stuff, which in Smalltalk I'd just debug and inspect. And sometimes in VS you just can't get what you want; you hit a brick wall. If it were not for Google and people posting esoteric workarounds, I don't know how I'd get anything done. And I love the examples that say "don't forget the comma, or else it won't work"... no error message, no warning, just no output.

Thing is, that's not the kind of thing you appreciate until you try something complex, which does not happen to a new user. I wonder if we would benefit from having code examples with pre-defined bugs, written in various languages, and then using them to show how you'd debug the problem. Show just how few barriers we have in Smalltalk to understanding what is going on in our code (and, more importantly, in other people's code).

I used to tell people that I saw a lot of similarity between programming in MVS 360 assembler and Smalltalk. For me, transparency was the big stick that I could use to whack the problem. From what I've seen of other IDEs (an admittedly short list), Smalltalk still does that the best.