How Business Leaders Make the Smart Choice by Using Cincom Smalltalk

Business Leaders Are Concerned with Risk

Business leaders are always concerned with risk. One bad decision could cause a loss of revenue, resources or personnel and could even lead to the untimely end of their business. This responsibility is one of the things that keep business leaders awake at night. They have the responsibility of making decisions that will generate enough revenue to keep their employees with jobs and providing for their families, all while trying to move the company forward and being competitive.

Research Shows that Risk Is Increasing

As we look at the tech market specifically, Forrester says that the 2019 and 2020 Tech Market has the potential to have more risk. In “The Global Tech Market Outlook for 2019 to 2020,” Forrester predicts that slower economic growth and consumer confidence in the US, as well as trade issues around the globe, may create more risk over these next two years for those in tech fields.

With this being such a crucial issue for business leaders, looking for the lowest risk on any decision is a high priority. In the tech market, there are so many choices of programming languages for application development. In fact, new programming languages seem to crop up each year as others fade away. With so many options, how can business leaders make the smart choice for which programming language to use?

We Suggest Cincom Smalltalk as a Low-Risk, High-Value Development Tool

So that leads us to Cincom! What’s the advantage in using Cincom Smalltalk?

Cincom is the largest commercial provider of Smalltalk in the world, with twice as many partners and customers than all other commercial providers combined. Whatever type of application you need, the Cincom Smalltalk suite of tools helps you create value at the lowest possible risk and assures you of the fastest return on investment.

What provides the high value of Smalltalk? Being a long-time Smalltalker, Arden Thomas, the Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk, says:

“Smalltalk had a massive research and development investment in time, iterations and careful development, to create a language that is easier to use and understand. Smalltalk generally allows solving a problem more succinctly, and clearly, which allows less code to solve a problem.

“Less and clearer code is easier to understand, maintain, and costs less over the life cycle of a software application. The research and development investment in Smalltalk is likely unrivaled by any other language.”

To give an illustration of this, Arden provides this quote and explanation:

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine, 
but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”  
– Benjamin Graham

Arden loves this quote because it gives a great analogy for why Smalltalk will still be successful and used in application development for decades into the future. In the quote, Graham relates the short term of the stock market to be like a popularity contest. The price of stocks could rapidly change, while the value of the stock remains the same. This could be from traders coming in and moving the market, the stock being manipulated in the short term or people simply chasing fads. 

In the long term, the market tends to gain value due to economic growth and other factors, similar to a weighing machine. Measuring stocks over longer periods of time weeds out the fads, leaving the actual price of the stock and reflecting the true value of the company. Investors should always avoid moving on short-term fads. Eventually these fads fade, and the true value of the stock is what remains. The same holds true for Smalltalk. Over time, even though challenged by many other languages, the productivity and value of Smalltalk wins out.

Smalltalk Is the Most Productive Language, But Don’t Just Take Our Word for It …

We know business leaders are not just looking for product messaging from vendors. They need validation from third-party sources—someone other than the vendor—that can help them confirm that they are making the smartest choice for their programming language. Although this isn’t new to Smalltalkers, business leaders looking for help in their decision-making can look to Capers Jones of Namcook Analytics for unbiased research on the topic.

Capers Jones is a long-time expert and author of studies that compare programming languages, including productivity measures. In a recent paper, Capers Jones shows several factors that contribute to the overall value of a programming language over the full life cycle of its use. Although the study shows many types of languages combined, you will see that Smalltalk comes out on top in general-purpose programming languages and also rates very high in function points per month with fewer lines of code.

* KLOC = lines of code, is a software metric used to measure the size of a computer program by counting the number of lines in the text of the program’s source code.

To see this paper in its entirety, click here.

As Thomas M. Nies, Chairman and CEO of Cincom Systems, Inc. says,

“High value and low cost with a rapid return on investment at low risk—
you simply can’t go wrong by choosing Cincom Smalltalk.”