Hi Marcus, hello to all! You wrote:
> Sometimes I think there is something I fundamentally don't understand... In history, the fastest growing opensource communities consisted of partly employed professionals, who invested lots of their spare time in driving a software package forwards, hoping, that, one day, there will be a payoff in terms of: a) getting known as specialist to get hired b) learn new concepts to make yourself or your students happier (adademic research) :-) c) join a group to build a commercial or adequate product to found a enterprise on, become shareholder, go to stock exchange, become rich d) mixture of above In any case - there has to be a "coherent concept", a realistic future or idea, why one should invest into such thing on a descending branch like Smalltalk. For Squeak/Etoys/Scratch it's quite clear. Teaching programming to children. IMHO, there is no better software to teach childen. Alan Kay as community organizer and figurehead leading a crowd of followers. There is a community of people, driving that stuff slowly, but steadily forward. In germany its HPI investing lots into building up knowledge in Smalltalk/Squeak/EToys. Money comes from SAP founder. Very idealistic man. The situation of Pharo reminds me a bit of Dolphin Smalltalk: Where's the customer who urgently needs such a product? There are a lot of free competitors around: Smalltalk/X, GNU, Little, Vista ... It's not easy to explain the differences of concepts behind those smalltalks. But it's much harder to explain, why we need to invest more time and sink more money into a (commercially) "sinking boat" of technology. I could make out a few "trends" in software technology since some time: * Parallel computing. (Smalltalk rather has a structure of a human brain, no chance to parallelize, wrong algorithms behind) * In Form Matics: Bringing everything in a form of "XML", "XAML", "FXD" "XUL", "SVG", "KXML" ... e.t.c. A fatal trend. Programmers today, expecialy those working in JAVA or C# ... have to bother much more about bringing data "in form", than to do something really productive. * Standards: Important is the standardisation of data (data exchange standards", not so much the toolkit or the programming language, you use. See Java: Groovy, Jython, JRuby or Microsoft .NET language park. * Animated GUI's, Touch: With the upcoming of Apples "touch technology" (concepts from stanford university) a new trend has come ... animated, moving selectors, menus with - OpenGL ES hardware acceleration on 2W power consuption processors (TI OMAP3 , 4). * The end of SQL-92 databases: There is a clear trend towards OODBMS and persistence. * Cloud computing: In former times called "UNIX terminals" now replace "FAT Clients". * WEB OS coming up: Palm PRE, Google OS, all based on JAVASCRIPT. * Desktop applications go to portable computers. (Mailclient on desktops in huge enterprises will one day be replaced by new software technologies on portables) * Computer games go Shockwave/Flash. JAVA, SILVERCLOUD, WPF, SQUEAK Plugin laying far behind. * Software/commuications standards and technologies go into cars: AutoSAR standard soon will replace proprietary technologies of car manufacurers. One trend, perhaps the most important trend is still unbroken: * Each computer professional will only recommend or suggest that technology that keeps himself employed and busy for long, long time. Who has invented those trends? Still APPLE, IBM, SUN, ORACLE, MICROSOFT. Today one standard is still vacant. Portables OS and GUI. Who will make the run? Perhaps Microsoft, perhaps GOOGLE, perhaps Nokia/Siemens, perhaps Samsung ... who knows? Hundreds of millions of dollars are being inwasted in new GUI prototypes ... IMHO one standard will fall in a few years: INTEL Processors. Asia with its billion of people need "high performance, low power consuption" standards. ARM and MIPS, IBM, FreeScale, TI will make the run. And: Linux will make the run as basic platform for all new technologies mentioned above. But: I still can't figure out, where exactly Pharo or Smalltalk as software technology could occupy a vacant market niche or even set standards. regards, Guido Stepken -- View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/Let-s-hire-a-Pharo-developer-tp4161222p4162145.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
