My adventure began in 2007 when a dear friend of mine from Cherniak Software, a major Smalltalk shop, persuaded me to try Smalltalk. After many years of programming in C and C++ and FORTRAN and Tandem TAL and assembly language, I found that Smalltalk was a breath of fresh air! It was a beautifully simple and elegant language. It had a beautifully simple and elegant programming environment. It was astonishingly easy to learn, and yet it was unbelievably powerful (uncharacteristic of a simple instructional language intended to teach children how to program).

Years later, after I saw how Smalltalk was languishing in the marketplace, I decided to found Smalltalk Renaissance, a marketing and promotional nonprofit. I served as its Campaign Director during 2015.

I found it difficult to engage the Smalltalk community. After many years and many failed attempts to popularize Smalltalk, most had felt beaten down into submission. They began to rationalize that Smalltalk didn’t need to be popular. The community was smug and insular, and that was just fine with them.

I can’t say I blame them. Smalltalk has had a storied history and a lot of water under the bridge. But after all these years, it just didn’t seem worth getting their hopes up again.

Nevertheless, I was determined to give it another shot. It was no less than this great language deserved.

Forget Grassroots

My strategy was simple. For years, people had written numerous technical articles and blogs, and given numerous technical talks at conferences, demonstrating what you could do with Smalltalk and how you could do it. People had been contributing to various open source Smalltalk projects, in particular, the Pharo project, helping to improve the platform and making it more useful for businesses. However, the “if you build it, they will come” philosophy wasn’t working. Appealing to people on an intellectual basis wasn’t working. Smalltalk was still being ignored. What needed to be done, I surmised, was to appeal to people on an emotional basis, the way it’s done in marketing and advertising. Smalltalk needed to promote itself in the same way that Apple promotes iPhone and Mac computers, in the same way Donald Trump promotes himself as a Presidential contender.

Smalltalk needed to make a lot of noise in social media (not so much in conventional media because we don’t have the financial resources to do so). It needed to keep the marketing message very simple and highly focussed. It needed to bend the truth a little bit. It should appear flashy and exciting; Smalltalk had to attract as many eyeballs as possible. I had to take on the role of Steve Jobs, master marketer.