In Praise of the Very Best Programming Language
Today is the one-year anniversary of my seminal Smalltalk article, “How learning Smalltalk can make you a better developer.” It was a little more than a year ago when TechBeacon approached me to write a tech article for them. I chose to write about Smalltalk, my favourite programming language.
Since then, the article has been read by more than 63,000 people around the globe, if you include the reprints (or republications) in various places.
In a rare move, Hacker News offered to let me repost the article because they felt it deserved greater exposure. I did, and the response went through the roof!
The article has been reprinted here at Medium and at LinkedIn:
- https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/how-learning-smalltalk-can-improve-your-skills-as-a-programmer-fc5b2f56685
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-learning-smalltalk-can-improve-your-skills-programmer-richard-eng
The article has been reprinted at Tech In Asia at their behest: https://www.techinasia.com/talk/learning-smalltalk-better-developer.
The article has been translated into Russian: https://habrahabr.ru/post/328156/. I’ve been told it received more than 19,400 views!!!
There has also been remarkable coverage in social media and other venues:
- The article was written up at The New Stack.
- The article was discussed at Slashdot.
- A popular Ruby blog asked me to write about Smalltalk.
- My presence at Quora as a Smalltalk evangelist is well-known. Ditto for Medium, Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn.
All of this stemmed from that one TechBeacon article.
Also as a result of the article’s momentum, I was inspired to publish several extensive Smalltalk tutorials (employing the Raspberry Pi):
Why the Pi? On June 30, 2017, the Raspberry Pi won the prestigious UK engineering prize, the MacRobert Award.
Raspberry Pi has been selected as a MacRobert Award finalist for its inexpensive credit card-sized microcomputers, which are redefining how people engage with computing, inspiring students to learn coding and computer science and providing innovative control solutions for industry.
As well, I subsequently published several other follow-up articles that attracted wide attention:
- Why Pharo Might be the Future of Software Development
- Behold Pharo: The Modern Smalltalk (over 14,600 views!)
- Smalltalk May Be the Nikola Tesla of the IT Industry (over 5,500 views)
- What makes a programming language “cool?” (over 14,800 views!)
- Smalltalk and the Future of the Software Industry (over 18,000 views!)
What a breathtaking journey! I am so grateful to TechBeacon for providing just the right platform for promoting Smalltalk and engendering so many excellent by-products in my Smalltalk campaign.
And here’s one more: for my next project later this year, I plan to produce a documentary film about Smalltalk, its history and its impact on the world of IT. I’m very excited about it.
Happy Birthday!!! May the best of your past be the worst of your future.
