| > 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. |
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.