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by zapzupnz 2290 days ago
> Otherwise, the article would be pretty darn brief!

It is pretty darn brief. The title and first few paragraphs would lead one to believe that the article is going to be about programming language evangelisation.

Instead, it's nothing of the sort. It's nothing but a dishonest segue into listing the author's favourite merits of Smalltalk/Pharos then briefly mentioning the programming competition.

No dissection of existing approaches to programming language evangelisation; no analyses of successful approaches and lessons drawn from those with lesser success; no examination of the correlation between a programming language's long term succes and strong community-based evangelisation and/or support from a major, well-known player in the IT industry.

None of that.

The mention of the competition is literally in the last two paragraphs, the last of which is only one sentence.

Let's be honest: this isn't really an article at all. It's clickbait, and we've all been had. It attempts to write a cheque it can't cash.

1 comments

> No dissection of existing approaches to programming language evangelisation; no analyses of successful approaches and lessons drawn from those with lesser success; no examination of the correlation between a programming language's long term succes and strong community-based evangelisation and/or support from a major, well-known player in the IT industry.

That was your expectation, not mine. You were led to believe one thing; I interpreted this article differently.

Sure, for some people, the title could be seen as clickbait. I didn't see it that way.

The author did present information, just not the information that you wanted. He pointed out that most language evangelization depends on technical publications and GitHub repos, and that this hasn't produced the desired outcome. That's practically axiomatic! Just look at where Clojure, Crystal, Elixir, F#, Haskell, Idris, Julia, Nim, Pony, and Ring are. They're still struggling for relevancy.

In the third paragraph, he states: "I’m a Smalltalk evangelist and Pharo is one of these languages." There's nothing dishonest here. He's presenting Pharo and the programming competition as a sample case study.

Once you dive into the linked article, you learn all you need to know about the competition.