2009/9/20 Marcus Denker <[email protected]>: > > 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 >
(wearing a devil's advocate hat) I fear that Pharo, at some day could repeat the fate of Squeak. At version 2.0, 3.0 or whatever, you will lose interest (for whatever reason) in supporting it and step down from leading the project, as well as other current developers. The people who will lead it next will have a bit less authority to change anything, and there already will be a certain 'backwards compatibility' pressure from community. Also, much more people will not feel so confident in new leaders comparing to you, simply because they could not know much about them, or because they are not founders etc etc. In this situation, if someone will raise a hand, and say - lets throw out X, and replace it with Y, because its better, will have a high chances to be burned out. (wearing off a devil's advocate hat) I hope that there are a good strategy behind activities in Pharo, to not let the progress slowdown. And if not, then it is right time to think about it. > > -- > Marcus Denker - http://marcusdenker.de > PLEIAD Lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile > > > _______________________________________________ > Pharo-project mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project > -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig. _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
