Hello Pharoers, (sorry for the long post)
I'm on holidays so I've been silent this latests days, but I didn't want to let the opportunity goes to propose a toast :) This year has been a great year (yeah, but not like those annoying facebook cards), one year where we have worked itensively in the patient consolidation of several lines of work. This has been possible thanks to the great improvement that we have made in the Pharo process itself, which required (and still requires) a massive amount of effort: Since I arrived here (but not necessarily *because* I arrived here: this is the work of everyone in Pharo community, I'm just pointing to what I've seen and collaborated :P), we have changed a lot of things: - we have deployed a solid CI infrastructure that can handle our integration cycle without too much complications. Even if we still find problems time to time, this has been an incredible step forward. - thanks to this we have been able to change our release cycle from "it happens when we believe is ready" to time-boxed releases, so we have created Pharo 1.4, 2.0 and this year what, for me, is one of the most complete and cool releases (up to now) that we have produced: Pharo 3.0. - We have increased massively the amount of tests in the system (no sure what is the percentage, but is high), so we have been able to change core parts in the system without causing too much pain to developers (yeah, we know there have been some errors some times, but well... "errare humanum est", and I think we have learned from the process and now we do not make same mistakes... in any case they are new mistakes :P). - We have made huge steps in the "Pharo modularisation project", thanks to the Pharo-minimal images and work we have started to move all into a repeatable configuration (thanks to metacello and tools developed for this). - We have also incorporated the VM building to this process and testing cycle, so is a lot easier for everyone to build their own VM (if needed), and for us we can be sure (as sure as possible at least) VM is in good shape. - We have improved documentation and release new books. People have working a lot in a lot of cool and instructive videos that have moved our "learning curve" several steps ahead. And this is just one part of the "invisible, ant work of everyday", in the visible part, I will not bore (more than needed :P) with details about previous releases, so I will just point some of the great things we have made for the upcoming release, Pharo 4: - Thanks to GTools, we are slowly going to a better set of tools, with new ways of see/handle old things. This is the most visible change this year (and it has caused the most flamed wars, but well... we are a passionate community). This release we have a new inspector, playground and spotter (god, spotter is sooooo cool!), next release we hope to integrate a new debugger and if planets align, a new Coder. - We introduced OSWindow as a preview, a tool which will allow us to do a lot of years waited features: start UI from image instead from VM (transmiting to the used the decision of having one or not), multi-windows, a vectorial UI instead the good-but-old bitblt we have now. - We enhanced Athens and introduced the new TxModel. We still do now achieve our objective of migrate our morphic drawing mechanism to athens, but this is a lot of work and will take some time. - We have improved a lot the development cycle with the introduction of smart suggestions, the upcoming smart breakpoins and reflectivity. - And of course, we have worked a lot in the cleaning of the system (an invisible and ungrateful work, believe me) And this is just a glimpse, what I wrote this morning before breakfast, wanting to thank all of you to let me be part of this super cool community, and wanting to have a toast with you: For a 2015 with more stories, more adventures, more Pharo! Esteban
