Re: LFM + LFSP = LFE?

[David Herman <address@hidden>]

> Saying "just use one environment, and do *everything* in Smalltalk" 
> is, in a
> sense, asking people to switch OSes and abandon existing tools.  Or, 
> put
> another way, it's an indivisible bundle of functionality, which 
> removes a
> lot of choice.  That's a tough sell, even ignoring the language switch.
> Whatever new environment is being sold better be able to do 
> *everything*.

I agree. A friend told me that to convince someone to change tools, you 
can't just prove to them your tool is better, you have to prove to them 
it's at least ten times better than anything they currently have. For 
most people, they'll hit the first roadblock with something new and 
abandon it for familiar territory. I think to be a successful advocate 
you have to show point-for-point how your tool matches everything the 
existing tools can do, and then blows them out of the water with X, Y, 
and Z. (And then, of course, the hard part, which is getting them to 
hang in there through the learning curve.)

In this case, using text files for source code might be primitive, but 
programmers know how to use this pretty powerfully, e.g., find | xargs 
grep and the like. It's scary to a programmer to relinquish control to 
a mysterious black-box environment that they can no longer tweak with 
their familiar toolset. Given that this kind of tweaking is the primary 
activity of programmers, it's natural that they feel pretty protective 
of their familiar methods.

The Excel example was interesting, because while it's true nobody 
normally thinks "I'd rather pop open a text editor to cook up a quick 
spreadsheet," programmers do, in fact, appreciate that you can open a 
CSV file directly in Excel: it's so much easier to print("1,2,3") than 
find some library that can manipulate the binary file format. So again, 
text might be primitive, but it's a least common denominator that a 
programmer is guaranteed to have tools for.

Dave