[zapzupnz]

This entire article is nothing but evangelisation for Pharo. Misleading title, worthless post.

I’m not surprised either. The author only ever writes Pharo evangelicals that consistently fail to demonstrate any of the supposed benefits; we’re always to simply believe what is said.

Any body can show me buzz words. Nobody gets points for buzz words, not even for effort.

That’s patently not how one promotes a programming language.

[smalltalkcoder]

Evangelization is "preaching"; it's essentially advertising or marketing.

There's no one way to preach or advertise. One can take a number of different approaches. Presenting technical information is one way, the most common way. It's how most languages are promoted. But most languages never succeed with this approach. Most languages never gain much mind share.

So the author has taken another approach, something that is seldom attempted. The programming competition is an original and clever idea.

I'm not sure how one can "demonstrate the benefits" of a programming language. Most languages have been used successfully in software projects (e.g., Crystal, Elixir, F#, Haxe, Julia, Nim, etc.). Does trotting out these projects prove anything?

[zapzupnz]

> There is no one way to preach or advertise

But writing articles about a particular premise then barely discussing it or offering a solution, that's not it.

> The programming competition is an original and clever idea

It's not that original; competitions for languages, especially to develop particular solutions in a language, happen all the time. That's how plenty of lesser-used languages wind up with some of the 'batteries' that erstwhile appeared to be missing.

It's a clever idea, yes. However, mention of the competition is also barely a paragraph's worth of text's mention at the bottom of a blog post that, I re-emphasise, gives the impression of discussing programming language evangelisation but then almost immediately makes no interesting remarks on the topic other than "some programming languages are still obscure", immediately launches into a poorly-demonstrated list of reasons why Pharo is apparently so good, and then a sentence or two about a competition.

The competition isn't even really discussed, how well it did, how many participants it drew, what came out of it. As it states, the success of the experiment is yet to be determined — which makes mention of it even more confusing.

We have a blog post with a broad, general scope that finishes with no real conclusion to its own thesis. This isn't advertising, this is spam.

> I'm not sure how one can "demonstrate the benefits" of a programming language

- Code examples (like GTK+ new website)

- Interactive widgets on websites (like ReasonML's website)

- Demonstrations of how a specific idea is better/more easily/more stably solved using that language (like most functional programming languages' websites)

- Interviews, often as blog posts or podcasts, with developers who've deployed applications or services backed by the language

There are plenty of ways that plenty of languages (and other technological artefacts, such as libraries and runtimes) can demonstrate their benefits, many more than I've listed.

Anything has to be better than saying "yes, it's better" without being able to reasonably demonstrate how or why to the satisfaction of people whose existing set of tools already ably work for them.

> Does trotting out these projects prove anything?

Yes, actually. It does. Most programming websites are falling over themselves to demonstrate that their languages are successfully used and deployed in all sorts of situations, some more domain-specific than others.

It proves that something not only is ready for the big time but also can do it something so much better than competing solutions — and, again, will demonstrate how or why.

[smalltalkcoder]

This is a decidedly peculiar attitude. The web is a vast global network of hyperlinks — that was its original intent. A web user is expected to follow the hyperlinks to discover more information.

The author provided the key hyperlinks: https://smalltalk.tech.blog/2020/03/07/jrmpc-2020-award-winn... and the YouTube video link, as well, which also links to the main JRMPC website. Once you get to the JRMPC website, you can learn ALL about the competition in great detail, including the source code to the competition!

Moreover, the smalltalk.tech.blog itself shows the author's approach to evangelizing the language. It's one of pure marketing, trying to engage the audience with flashy visuals and more hyperlinks to examples, resources, etc. It's a very nice layout.

The whole point of the web is that a single document doesn't have to cram in all the information in one location. Think of this particular article as an "executive summary." You want to learn more? Follow the hyperlinks and do a deep dive.

The article was never intended to spoon-feed you. Use the web as intended. I did, and I'm more knowledgeable as a result.

[smalltalkcoder]

> competitions for languages, especially to develop particular solutions in a language, happen all the time.

Perhaps, but they aren't well-advertised. It's difficult to find these competitions even using Google search. Where are they???

I'd like to know what programming competitions exist for Clojure, Dart, Elixir, Haskell, Julia, Lua, Nim, and Rust. Can you point to any? Thanks.

[louiscyphre]

> The competition isn't even really discussed, how well it did, how many participants it drew, what came out of it.

I took the article as an invitation to dig deeper into the competition (follow the links). So I did. Here's what I learned...

Thirty teams registered for the competition. They represented 18 schools from 13 cities and 3 provinces all across Canada:

- St. Michaels University School (Victoria)

- St. John’s School (Vancouver)

- John G. Diefenbaker High School (Calgary)

- Robert Thirsk High School (Calgary)

- Webber Academy (Calgary)

- Strathcona High School (Edmonton)

- Waterloo Collegiate Institute (Waterloo)

- Centennial Collegiate Vocational Institute (Guelph)

- Westmount Secondary School (Hamilton)

- Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute (Toronto)

- Woodbridge College (Vaughan)

- Langstaff Secondary School (Richmond Hill)

- Henry Street High School (Whitby)

- Bayridge Secondary School (Kingston)

- A.Y. Jackson Secondary School (Ottawa)

- Longfields-Davidson Heights Secondary School (Ottawa)

- Nepean High School (Ottawa)

- St. Patrick’s High School (Ottawa)

Here is the list of participating teams: https://teams.jrmpc.ca/teams .

Here is the list of teams in the leader board for the final, prize-winning round: https://teams.jrmpc.ca/leaderboard .

So, here were the winners:

First Prize of $6,000 went to team ‘WCI1’ of Waterloo Collegiate Institute in Waterloo, Ontario.

- Keenan Gugeler (Captain)

- Alex Liao

- Ethan White

- Thomas Ingram

Second Prize of $4,000 went to Team Dijkstra of Centennial Collegiate Vocational Institute in Guelph, Ontario.

- Andrew Dong (Captain)

- David Xiao

- Alexander Liu

- Brayden Chumbley

Third Prize of $3,000 went to team ‘Bickle Blatwoon’ of Robert Thirsk High School in Calgary, Alberta.

- Xinhua Cao (Captain)

- Hunter Chen

- Umut Emre

- Ethan Kerr

The following teams were recognized for their fine efforts in the Honour Roll. They were awarded $500 each.

- The Battle of Waterloo from Woodbridge College in Vaughan, Ontario

- Computationalism from St. Michaels University School in Victoria, BC

- Quad Coders from St. Michaels University School in Victoria, BC

Throughout the JRMPC blog (https://jrmpc.ca/blog/ ), all the competition software was made available for you to download so that you could play with it yourself. That includes all the source code!

A great article comparing JRMPC to another similar competition was published: https://smalltalk.tech.blog/2020/03/03/battlesnake-the-compe... . It revealed some terrific insight.

All in all, the competition appeared to be a great success. It has certainly drawn a lot of attention, which was purportedly the goal. This is the PR value that it sought.