Hi Stef -
Thank you for your kind words. I'm glad that we all seem to be ready to
leave the past behind us and move on into the future. I fully understand
(and appreciate) your decision to fork Pharo and I have most definitely
no objections to its direction and goals.
Talking about goals, I think there's a lot of overlap here. We all want
a small system, a cool system, a clean system, a fast system, an
innovative system. So there is a good number of things where we could
and should work together. And obviously, we all appreciate the numerous
contributions to both Squeak and Pharo; neither system would be where it
is without the contributions from the community.
How a more effective sharing might look like is a bit open to me though.
I spend most of last week thinking about what kind of setup could serve
both projects (this is what delayed my reply in the other conversation)
in a way that doesn't require either side to make unacceptable
compromises but unfortunately I drew a blank here.
It seems to me that neither Squeak nor Pharo are yet at a point where it
could sensibly (i.e., without needlessly increasing the burden of the
contributors) utilize a straightforward sharing mechanism. Any
meaningful ideas would be welcome.
Perhaps a better way to go about it might be to identify important
non-core packages that we both intend to support and convince their
maintainers to keep an open and inclusive attitude. For example, having
Filesystem and Xtreams available in both projects might be a good start.
Other than that, let me remind you that Squeak has an open contribution
process and that many Pharo developers, including you, Markus, Adrian,
Michael, Lukas and many more have been invited to be part of the
core-developers group of Squeak. All of you received an invitation to
participate and improve Squeak when the trunk was initiated. The
invitation is still open.
Cheers,
- Andreas
On 3/26/2010 4:17 AM, stephane ducasse wrote:
Dear Squeakers
I want to send you a message because I estimate Squeakers and I want to open
the door to see how new relationship can be build.
So consider that as an open hand - even if my english may let you think
otherwise.
First, Pharo is not against Squeak. We forked because we believed that
we could not make Squeak move in any coherent direction. We are sure
that you understand our reasons. Just think a moment about the amount
of time and energy we invested in Squeak in the
past (I wrote more than anybody else books on squeak, build tutorials,
lecture support, videos....- with esug over the years we spent more than
30 kEuros in Squeak related actions) so deciding to go for Pharo was
not an easy choice but a necessary one: At one point I was thinking to quit
Smalltalk and go to see Ruby and Python for real. Pharo is the only way
that I get back my fun in Smalltalk.
So what are my dreams?
For Pharo
======
We want a clean, lean and fast Smalltalk. An implementation that makes
other dynamic language jealous.
We want a place where we/you can innovate. We want people to be able to
invent THEIR future.
We want a place where people can make money with it and build robust
applications.
Being able to experiment fast is important but for that the system
should be clean, robust and flexible.
Having a platform for experimentation requires that the platform is not
experimental.
About innovation I mean in no order:
Support for multitouch screen, bootstrappable Smalltalk, immutability
bit and its impact, ephemerons,
new module system?, first class instance variables, using traits for
real (like in ruby where any class can be a model
without inheriting from model), VAT-like system?, event system like in
AmbiantTalk?,
I put ? because some of these should be implemented assessed tested...
and understood deeply.
About clean
Clean network, clean event system, clean object kernel, better compiler
(open - we got first class instance
variable with no runtime penalties in one afternoon). Clean class
builder...
Now enough about Pharo. http://www.pharo-project.org/
About Etoys
========
I love Etoys (we translated the book and did more presentations of
etoys than most squeakers) but I do not like its implementation.
Why? Because it is bad. Any body that looks at it knows it. When I
removed Etoys part from Pharo I'm sad but there is no other choices. Now it
does not mean that I'm against Etoys and Etoys has the Etoys 40 image
(note that we collected in 3.9 most of the etoys fixes with little support
from Etoyers which forked way before, we did the same with the fixes
of diego of Smalltalk). But again you can judge otherwise.
About the ranting or the little war between Squeak and Pharo
======================================
Frankly I'm tired about us ranting against Squeak/andreas/... and the
inverse. For example Traits are cool, Javascript and PHP
will probably have them as Perl-6, Scala, Fortress. Now Squeak can
remove them. I have no problem with that. Seriously this is your decision.
People in squeak-dev can freely say negative points about me if this
helps. I decided that I will not rant nor get negative feelings about that. I
found the red pill :)
*I* decided that I want to head to the future. So we will not rant nor
make any bad statement about the past anymore. Not even report history or
on old facts: if you were there you should remember, else there is the
archive :). This is my last mail on the past.
Frankly I have the best job I can dream about. I'm lucky just check my
h-index for the fun, I have more than most researchers I know. In addition,
I loved working and learning from people like lukas, adrian, nicolas, levente,
marcus, ..... The next 10 years should be the best of my life and I
will take advantage of that. I want to have **10/15** years of pure
fun and I will do it. I want and will create positive energy. Look at ESUG
we are doing a great job.
About cross dialect energy
=================
Now the key point of this mail. I **deeply** appreciate the attitude of
people like nicolas, levente, and igor that do not bash us and help Pharo
but also Squeak. I sent this message mainly because of their attitude.
I'm sad to see all this (their) energy duplicated. We cleaned and improved a
lot Pharo over the last two years (more than you may think) and we will
continue. Squeak could have benefitted from it. Nicolas luckily for you
pushed a lot of our fixes in Squeak already. I'm getting the fixes of
Squeak that are interesting for Pharo. Now depending on the Squeak vision
we could share some common things. May be we can build a better future
together but not at all price. You see our goals is to get a clean, lean,
flexible and robust system. If you want to share something with us let us
know. You know now the vision of Pharo.
Squeak may want to compete with us too. This is ok too.
If you want to help us building our vision you are welcome. Our logo is a
lighthouse and it means that it will stand and last long because it has to
guide boats. So we will continue Pharo against tempests and giant waves :)
https://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/26678/pharoVideo.zip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2LeNBY_5gk
The video is really cool (dan this is the one you wanted on waves).
Stef
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