Another really important point about pharo.
We want to make sure that the system as a whole can CHANGE and EVOLVE.
Of course change is costly because it can impact others but this is
really important
if we do not accept change there is no way that the system can get
better.
A good system is like simCity and not like a stack of stuff added one
on top of the
others.
Then we want pharo to be the vehicule to invent new systems. We want
pharo
to make sure that Smalltalkers can build great abstractions which are
the strength of the language.
We would like to have better support for creating new languages,
systems....
A concrete example, we would like to have first class instance
variables instead of plain string
(The benefits are really important - I will not explain that here).
But if you look
at Tweak (at one point) the class definition got added XML
specification to have different instance
variable kinds: We do want XML for that since it can be done in
Smalltalk and also
we do not want to patch the compiler just for that but we would like
to have first class instance
variable with a nice protocol to be able to specify different instance
variable semantics.
Of course it will take time because we want to pay attention not to
break ....
and we should find the time to do it.
In pharo
- we do not accept anymore to see a bad method and close our eyes
(ref to pragmatic programmers book and the story about the broken
window - the point is that if
you walk in a street with dirt everywhere, papers on the floor and
you leave in a house with one broken window,
may be you will throw away paper on the floor and probably you will
care when the next window
will be broken. We want a system where there is no dirt on the floor
(or controlled) and broken windows got repaired
as soon as they appear)
- we do not accept not to integrate a good fix because it may break
an old experiment
nobody maintain anymore.
Also the fact to have a leaner system will make sure that we can
maintain it adapt it ...
test it, document more easily.
Stef
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