Dear Janko
Am 21.02.12 13:07, schrieb Janko Mivšek:
Hi Chris,
Thank you very much for your experience report and I think I'm not alone
to like to hear from your more about what are your wishes as a manager
from the Pharo in the future. Because you are an "enterprise" (in a
positive meaning of that word) Pharo user.
Thank you for your warm welcome! I hope to not boring the list with my
business gibberish. I promise to keep quiet again very soon. ;)
Maybe let me start asking you an opinion of what I'd like to see from
Pharo as a priority:
- more stability,
- better user experience (UX),
- better version control and packaging tools
- better integration of tools
- tabbed browsing, back button etc
Although stability and performance are important priorities, as far as
we are concerned stability is not a large issue. With 10 years of
experience operating hundreds of such applications we were able to build
a framework which operates such web applications reliable. And Pharo
even improved this situation a lot. We would only wish some small
improvement like error handling on startup and seldomly Pharo image are
freezing, but this is hard to debug.
Our priority would be definitely the improvement of the IDE and source
code management. Working with Smalltalk is already fun and offers a very
efficient way of developing sophisticated solutions, if the IDE would
further simplify the process of developing step-by-step, the work with
Pharo would make more and more fun. But, working on the UX is far not
the same as working on new feature or hunting bugs. It needs a clear
vision for everyone working with it and changes need to be deployed
carefully. This would be one of our seldom criticism. A few changes in
the handling of the IDE were surprising and appeared to be without any
concept (which also means that we just did not understand the idea
behind). IMHO, such improvements would need a careful planning and
communication with the final users.
The integration of tools is not that important. We just use external
software such as PostgresQL, ImageMagick, Apache FOP, etc. which can be
connected using several, pretty stable interfaces.
More polishing and boring bug hunting tasks therefore and just a bit
less fundamental rewritings like compiler etc. Later are more academic
and more interesting, yes, but IMHO for us the "enterprise" users the
above priorities are much more important.
I agree with Stef. Of course the above priorities are much more
important for our own businesses. Nevertheless, a lively community and
an innovative strategy would not exist if the Pharo board would
concentrate on these priorities only. Pharo should allow to develop
innovative other applications and new development concepts too. And, it
is a fact that this intelligent community is driven by some academic
users which is exactly why we believe it to become better and better.
Regards,
Chris
