On 20.09.2009, at 13:49, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
> They probably moved while we got stuck.
It's like with money: there is an "inflation" of constant
progression. Everthing gets better slowly but constantly.
Over 10 years, this results in quite some progress.
Especially as you get the effect of "compound interest": By making
something
a little bit better, the next step of making it again a little bit
better
gets a little bit easier.
As with compound interest, the effect is non-linear and completely
against human
intuition.
> This is all the story behind pharo: moving again.
What one needs to ask is always: How great could a system be over time
if one would just
do the next trivial, tiny, small step? And that over 10 years? With
Squeak, this
was impossible. Every small improvement was directly criticised as
beeing "not good
enough" and thus not worthwile for Squeak. With that attitude you go
nowhere. As was
proven in 10 years with Squeak.
Of course, you should not *just* do tiny improvements. But it's like
investing: there
might be the chance to buy some pre-ipo stock cheap in the future.
Does that mean
that I put the money under the bed for no interest, or do I invest it
for some tiny
percentage e.g in a money-market account the meantime? With Squeak,
the community decided
that doing nothing was the right thing.
Marcus
--
Marcus Denker - http://marcusdenker.de
PLEIAD Lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile
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