amen zwa, esq.<p>Small- to medium-sized businesses should shun the massive web <a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/UI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>UI</span></a> frameworks and application services being peddled by BigIT, when developing their small, internal-use business applications intended for use by a handful of in-house business analysts. Instead, these companies should use <a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/Smalltalk" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Smalltalk</span></a> (Pharo, Cuis, or Squeak) to develop such software. Smalltalk has tonnes of advantages—not to mention decades of track record—for implementing enterprise applications:</p><p>• It is purely OO with decent FP facilities (it is the precursor of modern OO-FP hybrids)<br>• Its simple syntax can be described on a 5×7 card<br>• It is easy to get comfortable with, so much so that generations of preteens have used it in classrooms, so an experienced modern programmer can pick up the language in mere minutes<br>• It is powerful enough to implement itself, its libraries, its UI, and the whole blessed OS on the Alto<br>• It is the progenitor of the MVC pattern and, since IBM VisualAge, all modern implementations use the time-tested MVP pattern<br>• Its persistent VM obviates the need to export application state to external persistent media like file system or relation database (the VM is the application state, as it were)</p><p>Pharo Smalltalk, sponsored by INREA, is my favourite. Its creator, Stephan Ducasse, is friendly and accommodating, and is a prolific writer. See this Pharo Books list: <a href="https://books.pharo.org" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">books.pharo.org</span><span class="invisible"></span></a>.</p><p>Those who are leading SmallIT should read these Pharo books:</p><p>• Pharo by Example (language)<br>• Enterprise Pharo (usage)<br>• Testing in Pharo (TDD)<br>• Application with Spec 2.0 (GUI)</p><p>Pharo does support conventional IT practices:</p><p>• Zinc HTTP<br>• Seaside web UI framework<br>• Voyage object database<br>• Glorp ORP</p>