Hi Stef, From one of those who manages to eke out a living using Pharo, a very big "Thank You" to you all.
Best regards, Mike Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network -----Original Message----- From: Stéphane Ducasse <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:45:50 To: An open mailing list to discuss any topics related to an open-sourceSmalltalk<[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] Subject: [Pharo-project] thoughts of a tired but happy man... Since I work too much I'm tired and when I'm tired I have strange thoughts :) Let us see what they are (if of any interest) I do not really know if people realize that in fact we could be payed for building our own private little toy and we could publish cool papers, looks smart and look at ourselves quite proudly in the mirror the morning. The look of the guy that accomplished his duty and is quite cool too. This would be a perfect life: a full life of a brillant researcher having fun with his little toys. Students of course would have fun with us and we would be a happy family. Imagine we could even write books, little books and everybody would be happy. flower, butterflies and the rest... Now we decided to do pharo. Why: because we want other people to be able to make a living out of it. I'm not sure that people deeply understand that. We do pharo (of course so that we can experiment crazy ideas but we could have probably do that better in Scheme from my experience) because we want others to be empowered and in the position of making money with it and changing/controlling their life because they are not forced to use something that they do not like. So this means that each time we spend time on it (we = the community) we make sure that others or the community can feed their kids based on our labor. For me this is a cool task and I enjoyed doing it even if sometimes my moral is low because I would like to go much much faster. You could think that we should have better done to have fun with our little toys and sometimes I think that yes this could be true. But we decided that it was more rewarding to build real systems with customers that are not always happy, have bugs. So when you have strong expectations, bold statements about Pharo think also that this is the simple work of people most of the time not payed to do it and that nicely share it. We know where we want to go, sometimes the system does not get the shape we want. but each little peebles after the other one we shape it. Now you can also help to make it better. Stef
