On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
Hi levente,
after your mails some people sent me private mails because they did not feel
well. They wondered why people were sending mails against pharo in this
mailing-list while they do not send aggressive mails in squeak.
I can understand them. Now I think that this is ok that you send the mails you
want,
you can send your feelings here, even if this is not that positive :). Kicks in
the ass is always a feedback and we can make progress.
I always appreciated your benchmarks and precise remarks. I liked (and I told
you publicly) that you always replied to my mails about your changes in squeak.
I can understand your frustration (I have been there for years trying to move
squeak - again we did not do pharo for an ego problem - I cannot tell the
number of students that looked at me like I was an idiot to use a system with
all the colors and messy menus). We do pharo to build an ecosystem where people
can expand, create cool ideas and make money to live from them.
What is wrong with that?
Now do not play pharo against squeak, it will not work on the mid term and this
is not fun for everybody. I would love that Squeak builds its own real vision:
for example been a real multimedia platform. We could have a lot of fun. Now I
think that except a miracle this will not happen: after 10 years, squeak failed
to go to the next level - I wanted everything and more Cairo, Zoomable
interface, crazy ideas and all the rest - I was a big fan of Sophie (I can tell
you that I was a bit fucked by some bulgarian people on that level trying to
support Squeak and sophie there) and other impara tools. Now impara failed to
make squeak sexy and them the center of the universe - They could have but may
be they did not have the vision to be something else than
building tools for alan. Anyway this is life. Now I wonder why you get stuck
in Squeak you are welcome in Pharo. May be Squeak fits your vision and spirit
but I do not understand what we are doing wrong so that you are mad against us.
Let me respond to only those parts that weren't answered already:
I don't like the idea what some Pharo users and developers (yes, that's
including you too) are suggesting about Squeak. A few examples:
- Squeak has no vision
- Squeak should be a multimedia platform
- the purpose of Squeak is to support EToys
- Squeak should only be used for educational purposes
- Squeak is a mess (while Pharo is clean)
- Squeak is dead
etc.
IMHO Squeak is and should be "a modern, open source, full-featured
implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and
environment". This implies that it should be good for everything what
Pharo is good for. Since I use it for software developement and I'm making
a living with it - just like many other people in the past (including
some of you) and present - it should be developer friendly too.
Why "I got stuck in Squeak"? That's a long story, so let me tell you what
I like better in Squeak than Pharo instead:
- Squeak's update mechanism is a lot more stable. If you update your image
you have ~99% chance that it will work with your already loaded packages.
I can always use the bleeding edge version, because it's like a beta or
rc. We have some deployed images which were updated from 3.10.2 to
the current 4.2 (with Seaside and lot of other packages).
- When it's possible to do something in a backwards compatible way, then
it's usually done that way.
- The contribution process is simpler.
- The code changes appear on the mailing list.
- Colorful windows make it easy to find the one you're looking for. Most
windows are grey in Pharo even if you use a "Squeak theme".
- The UI feels faster.
- I use the toolbar with it's search tool all the time. The taskbar in
Pharo doesn't seem to be useful, but that's probably because I used to
find windows by colors.
The list is not complete, but I guess the most important ones are here
from a user's POV.
Levente
Stef
