Introduction
The content of this post is a survey report of a Smalltalk questionnaire. The purpose of this report is to determine the opinion of developers about Smalltalk related topics. A limit of 10 questions was imposed to the survey because of the SurveyMonkey Free Account limitations.The survey was anonymous and contained partially structured questions with open-ended questions where participants could add thoughts or missing options. The survey was conducted from 11/10/2014 to 30/10/2014. Only the first week of the survey non-smalltalk forums were privileged. The information below summarize statistics:
Survey Statistics
(Click the following figures to open the whole image)Question 1 highlights
- Smalltalk was not listed as an option in the valid responses.
- This question was mostly directed to non-smalltalkers.
Question 2 highlights
- Goal of the question was to determine a general attitude towards the technology.
- There is a good reception of Smalltalk, although respondents where scarce (22).
- This question was mostly directed to non-smalltalkers.
Question 3 highlights
- The idea was the same as Question 2, but focused towards a professional level of choice.
- This question was directed to both smalltalkers and non-smalltalkers.
Question 4 highlights
- The question tried to determine the Smalltalk platforms most used.
- This question was mainly directed to smalltalkers.
- Unsurprisingly, Pharo, VisualAge and VisualWorks seem to be the most deployable environments.
- More recent or commercial projects like S8, Smalltalk MT or LSW are almost unknown.
- The respondents also noted Amber as ocasionally used or prototyped/deployed a product.
Question 5 highlights
- This question is similar to Question 4, but focused on the current use.
- Products like VisualSmalltalk and Smalltalk/X, both considered (technically) excellent Smalltalk flavors, keep almost unused.
Question 6 highlights
- This question addressed four technology aspects: Usability, Speed, Community Health and Overall.
- There is a notable unsatisfaction at the Community level for most Smalltalk communities.
- The old fallacy of Smalltalk being slow seems to be almost refuted by a general satisfaction in execution speed.
- Maybe unexpectedly, the usability award was for VisualSmalltalk.
Question 7 highlights
- All respondents answered this question.
- Besides the expected noise towards libraries for common application scenarios, there is a considerable interest in Data Science (Visualization, Mining, etc).
- Some respondents noted missing options like X-language invocation: SOAP, CORBA, MQ, REST and Good modern library support - easy call outs to native code or library wrappers.
