Smalltalk Survey Report

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.

Notes

Screengrab is a Firefox add-on which saves complete pages as images. And if you ever create a SurveyMonkey and don't want to pay to download results, is better to bookmark Screengrab.