In my professional work I use Smalltalk, Pharo to be exact.
This is my first job so I cannot really compare with other companies but I can compare to my university experience.
At the university I had to do 2 group projects. One in Java/Angular and the other we had the choice and I succeeded to convince others to do it in Pharo.
In the end we got a much better result in Pharo with more constraints. On the constraints we had for example the fact that I was alone to know Pharo at the beginning. Also we got a group problem and we ended up to be 3 when the other groups where 4-5. But we got the more advanced project at the end. We could not have done it in the languages the others used.
In fact, at the beginning, our teacher wanted everyone to do Java and/or Javascript, but she accepted that we used Pharo because she though we would not have the full team knowing Pharo fast enough and that we would stop Pharo to use Java. That did not happened.
Interesting and thanks! Follow up questions: 1.) What was the university project? 2.) Did you look for a company using Pharo, or join a company and convince them to let you use it? 3.) What kind of applications do you make at work and is deployment a problem? Thanks!
1) It was a project of multiple choice questions management with an administration part, a user part and a statistics part.
2) I joined a company using smalltalk.
3) We are developing a set of tools to do software analysis and planification of software refactorings. Deployment is not really a problem. I find it simpler than in Java. There is still room for improvements and I plan to contribute to Pharo to help the deployment when I wall find the time.
This is my first job so I cannot really compare with other companies but I can compare to my university experience.
At the university I had to do 2 group projects. One in Java/Angular and the other we had the choice and I succeeded to convince others to do it in Pharo.
In the end we got a much better result in Pharo with more constraints. On the constraints we had for example the fact that I was alone to know Pharo at the beginning. Also we got a group problem and we ended up to be 3 when the other groups where 4-5. But we got the more advanced project at the end. We could not have done it in the languages the others used.
In fact, at the beginning, our teacher wanted everyone to do Java and/or Javascript, but she accepted that we used Pharo because she though we would not have the full team knowing Pharo fast enough and that we would stop Pharo to use Java. That did not happened.