Stef, I approve<g>, provided you promise to keep it in perspective. If you are getting another layer of expectation of how computers work, then great. If you are allowing people with no image-based experience to discourage you, then please try to categorize their reactions into things that they will outgrow and things that we probably should address - there will be some of each.
It might be informative to split a small group of newcomers, give half of them Squeak 3.8 or something, and half of them the current Pharo. It's an interesting thought experiment at least, and hopefully it illuminates the massive progress in Pharo. On the minute front, I think that fast dragging should be enabled by default; Watery users appear to have it regardless of the setting. Overall, the GUI is getting pretty good. Eventually Pharo's dependence on "the" world menu will become problematic. I don't know that we need native windows nearly as much as we could benefit from the discipline they would force on us. It would be nice to be able to use one native shell per tool, but having everything in one main window can be useful too. Silent failures need to be hunted down and killed. It sounds like good FFI enhancements are on the way. Pharo probably could be faster. Bill ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stéphane Ducasse [[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2010 4:56 PM To: Pharo Development Subject: [Pharo-project] realized and learned something today :) Hi guys I think that over the years I (but also many of you, I know) tried to expose newbies to smalltalk or our culture. And often we get bad reactions, bad windows, bad colors, slow, why not in svn, ..... I think that showing Smalltalk to newbies is the best we can do to ourselves, not really to attract new people but also to get a large kick in the %^&* because most of the time students are not stupid, they are exposed to other technos. So each time we believe we want to show them something cool and they do not really consider it as cool as we believe, we can of course think that they are idiot (some of them are) but most of the time we can also think that may be we stayed too long in our little boxes and the world moved (interfaced well with c, fast, cool frameworks, has cool tools, processes (integration...), cool UIs, web stuff.....). So each time we get down because we do not see the little flame opening in the yes of the others we can think hard and get from them what we missed. I really happy to get exposed to student acid tests, this is a valuable feedback and I wanted to share that with you. Stef
