Last night, I gave the second presentation of my "Intro to Seaside" talk: this time to the patient people of the "Advanced PLUG" group. I had incorporated comments from the previous presentation by including less information about Smalltalk history, and more live demos to illustrate by doing instead of talking.
However, even after these adjustments, my should-be-50-minutes talk ended up taking almost 90 minutes. The consensus of the group seemed to be that I could eliminate even more of the "intro to Smalltalk" part, and concentrate on the meat of the talk: how Seaside workflow helps me get my webdev done faster, better, and cheaper, by abstracting and reusing in the two directions (web components, and workflow steps). Apparently, the simplicity of the Smalltalk code that I end up demoing is nearly self evident, and what's more important is that I show Seaside working, and my enthusiasm makes up for the lack of technical details. And with my next presentation to be at the largest open source conference in the world (FISL in Brazil in April), that's really what matters.
One of the things I discovered is that I can neither cut-n-paste from Keynote, nor type very fast. So I think the next time I do this talk, I'll pull a "Julia Child" and have "the cake already finished in the oven". I'll start to enter the code, and then switch to one already finished to skip the rest of the boring typing, unless there's a point to it. I have to work out the details of that, but I'm confident that there's some way to do it nicely.
Some of the attendees stayed around afterwards for a bit more detailed feedback, and I appreciated that. During this conversation, I observed and shared that my dozen years of experience as a leading Perl lecturer and writer are proving useful in determining how to present Smalltalk and Squeak and Seaside. My dedication to finding the sweet spot between free/open source and commercial viability has worked well for Perl, and I am sure I can bring that same skill set to the Smalltalk world as well.
If there is any year for Smalltalk to regain a commercial visibility, this will be it. I mean, look at all the things coming together:
- the OLPC XO is putting Smalltalk into the hands of thousands of young kids
- Cincom and Gemstone are stepping up to support Seaside in a big way
- Gemstone is offering the single-instance free commercial license and GLASS quickstart appliance
- Squeak's license is finally getting cleaned up
- Seaside is reaching a nice level of maturity
- Seaside running on GNU Smalltalk for those that want a command-line environment
- Croquet is maturing, even being adopted as a commercial "virtual meeting" space
- Ruby on Rails has reestablished dynamic languages as useful for the web
Looks like we really have an opportunity here. Carpe Diem!
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