Hi Esteban, seconding your points, it is important to acknowledge why a solid Pharo core is important and worth striving towards even if it can be painful. First, read Bret Victor's reflection on Doug Englebart: http://worrydream.com/#!/Engelbart
He makes the case that the vision that drove Englebart was important to how he realized things, giving the specific example of how his video conferencing system was fundamentally different than today's screen sharing technology. Today's screen sharing is basically a nice hack onto an existing single user system. Simply doing what Englebart did would require a lot of restructuring at the foundation. With Pharo, we have the possibility to really build / refactor from the ground up, building a fundamentally better foundation, ultimately making cool things possible. For my own work, I'm excited about the possibility of building a new multi-touch implementation from the ground up. That said, the current Pharo foundations have a number of problems for me: (1) Graphics are still based on BitBlt, which is slow and ugly. Moving over to Athens will address this. While I have successfully used Athens graphics, I still get VM crashes (which are probably due to Athens as I did not get the crashes beforehand). (2) Sound does not really work. On 64-bit linux, I can't simply play a recorded file as the sound plug-ins really only work for a 32-bit system. (3) Event handling does not get touch events. I've hacked this so far but a sustainable solution would be great. (4) Packages do not facilitate transfer of resources. For my purposes, I need to add images and sound to a package. This is not really possible right now. I am willing to help on these problems for the community but sometimes I need support, especially when C code is necessary, rather than Pharo code. For instance, if I could get a VM that gives me raw touch events into Pharo, I could take (3) from there. I'd also be willing to work on (4) but I could use some help. One intimidating part is that there are so many package managers for Pharo. It might be nice if we simplified down to one: the right one. Anyway, you can count me in for some contribution back to Pharo core but I might need some support from Pharo central and it won't happen for at least another month as I'm just getting set up in the new location (e.g., no access to a multi-touch device). Cheers, Jeff On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 7:44 AM, Esteban Lorenzano <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm writing this because I'm sad about what is happening in this list. > I'm seeing a lot of general negativity and non constructive ways to > discuss things. > I'm also seeing more and more people using Pharo for their particular > interests (which is of course a good thing) but less and less people who > contribute back to Pharo. > Finally, I'm seeing more frequently an attitude of "customer", more than > the conviction than this, Pharo, is also yours... > > Please people, we (the pharo "core" team) cannot do everything. We do not > have the manpower or the resources to hire manpower. We would like, but we > just do not have the resources (is already a blessing that we can work on > this, for now: INRIA is paying, but what it pays is *research*, not "pharo > the language", so this is a collateral advantage....) > > So, having an OPEN SOURCE project, with limited resources means that there > is a lot of things that depend on the community. > It depends on the community not just to fix, but to enlarge the ecosystem > in general too. > > So, I refuse to believe that we cannot be a cool and helpful community. > I refuse to believe that general negativity and bad humor can overcome the > joy of participating in this collective effort. > > So, here some recommendations for enhance the way we participate: > > - Be positive. Just "this is a s**t" does not help. Even if it is. > - Be propositional. Just "this is a s**t", and not telling what you > want/prefer does not help. > - Be proactive. Just "this is a s**t", and not report, discuss and (at > least time to time) provide a fix/enhancement does not help. > > In conclusion: not helping does not help :) > After all, this is the "pharo-dev" list. I mean, the list of people > wanting to participate from this great, community effort. > > cheers, > Esteban, still grateful of belonging to this community > > > > -- Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D. http://www.je77.com/ Skype ID: jochenrick
