Richard Kenneth Eng

Richard Kenneth Eng (born December 17, 1953 in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada) is a noted Smalltalk evangelist. On December 17, 2014, he launched his “Smalltalk Renaissance” campaign, which entailed a blog on Medium, and a social media barrage on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Reddit, Hacker News, and WordPress. The campaign also included a failed attempt to conduct a national Smalltalk programming competition for high school students.
On July 18, 2016, at the behest of TechBeacon, Richard Eng published a Smalltalk article entitled “How learning Smalltalk can make you a better developer.” This article was wildly successful, culminating in over 25,000 views in six months. On March 7, 2017, it surpassed 30,000 views (including republications at LinkedIn and Medium).
Richard Eng used the TechBeacon article as the basis for another promotional campaign called “Make Smalltalk Great Again,” in essence channelling Donald Trump and his bid for the U.S. Presidency. The centrepiece of this campaign was on Twitter through #MakeSmalltalkGreatAgain. Quora also became a key social media platform for advocacy.
The TechBeacon article became newsworthy enough to be written up at Slashdot. The article was subsequently republished at Tech In Asia, thereby exposing Smalltalk to the Asian IT community.
In 2017, Richard Eng wrote an extensive Smalltalk programming tutorial aimed at introducing programming to the widest possible audience, including people who feel anxious and inadequate about technology. In an attempt to make this tutorial go viral, he conducted a GoFundMe campaign. He also worked on the Redline Smalltalk open source project to put Smalltalk on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine); Smalltalk on the JVM was considered a key strategic element of Smalltalk evangelism.
Work life
As a physics graduate from the University of Toronto, Richard Eng began his programming career in 1980, culminating in his retirement from ATI Technologies in 2000 where he led the Windows NT Driver Group. He has since done pro bono IT work for various causes, in particular, collaborating with Dr. Frank Sommers, a world-leading sexologist based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to create a web presence, as well as mobile applications for providing stress relief.
In the course of his work, he used a variety of programming languages, including C, C++, C#, DIGITAL Command Language, FORTRAN, Go programming language, Java, MODCOMP assembly language, Objective-C, Python, Smalltalk, and Tandem Transaction Application Language. This was the foundation for his interest and advocacy in programming languages.

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