Hi ted > Thank you, I will; community support will be important -- developers (and > their managers!) are very conscious of the "critical mass" issue.
What I can tell you is that we are growing :). When a company with more than 30 millions lines of code wants to migrate to Pharo. It means something :) and we are helping them and they actively support the consortium with immediate impact. Pablo is working full time to improve pharo and we feel it. > They all want to know that if they make an investment in learning and using > a new > language, tools, development paradigm, etc. that there's a company/support > structure/resources behind it that will exist for a long time to come. No > one wants to "get stuck" with an orphan product or technology -- even if it > is attractive at first. (The culture here can be a bit risk-averse in > places.) Yes there is a strong support from the community and from the consortium. This is why we create the consortium (since 2012). It is here to support companies and pharo development and pharo and its community are growing steadily. Esteban went to give special lectures or coaching to companies in the past. Since a year the consortium is supporting Schmidt Pro and Lifeware based on contract and so far this is working well. We will continue. Also what is important is that Mooc is a key assets: why because it represents 15 years of teaching experience. There are OOP teachers that are learning things on OOP when watching the mooc. So the mooc is not only about pharo. Now a smart guy can learn Pharo in two days (Henrique Rocha did it and we hired him :), and after 2 weeks to play with the ide you can start to get fluent. BTW the Mooc value is around 150 Keuros and it is free because we did it and it was sponsored by our institute and some other universities. > We also welcome open-source projects, and use them freely. Adopting Pharo > would not be substantially different than our current widespread use of > Linux, C/C++, Python, Lua, Tcl, SVN, Git, etc. There's definitely a place > for it here. But very few know about it! Yes this is why we can help to show how we do things. We will tell you also where we are not so good and where we want to go. Right now we are starting a real effort for the following years on the virtual machine. One day we will revise the Pharo vision document (should be on internet somewhere) but it shows that we have a vision/roadmap and that we built it. > I've attended a Tech Talk (and plan to join tomorrow's talk). And I'm aware > of the consortium; I joined the Pharo Association myself as an individual. > There's no reason why we wouldn't/couldn't do so as an academic > organization, at some point (assuming my plans succeed). > > We have an unusual situation: JPL may be part of NASA (they own the > buildings, the equipment, the property, fund the projects, etc.), but we are > not civil servants -- we don't work for the federal government as do other > NASA center staff. We're actually staff members of Caltech, under > privileged long-term contract. So I can either be "a government employee" > (via contract) or "an academic staff member", depending (usually on what > kind of discount some business may be offering. ;^) :) You see you can play it the way you want. The first ticket for a company is 1000 euros and else you can play as an official academic member of the consortium. Now what is more important is that we listen to our users. So the consortium roadmap is validated by the consortium members and we are helping as much as we can. Our goal is to make people succeed with their Pharo projects. We want to create a vertuous ecosystem. A super concrete example, feenk reported that the windows update 1903/4 changed something and that their guys working on windows could not access git via libgit anymore. Pablo and Guille put this on their highest priority just after ESUG and it was solved within a couple of days. Feenk got problems with a binding or headless VM and pablo pair programmed with one of their engineering during ESUG. > So it may be easier as Caltech to have an academic association. Something > also for the future… Academic membership is simple and free. You have the same document than the industrial member. And I think that Caltech fit there. Now we also have some academics that pay to support Pharo. But this is the way people want to play it. > > -t > > > > > > -- > Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Developers-f1294837.html >
