On 14 April 2018 at 01:52, Richard Sargent <richard.sargent@ gemtalksystems.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 13, 2018 at 1:11 PM, Hilaire <hila...@drgeo.eu> wrote: > >> Sometime Pharo frustrate me a lot, I felt it too in the message from >> Benoit, in the other hand its community is very kind and always helpful. So >> it is not about blaming people. >> >> In my opinion, there are too much things pushed at the same time in >> Pharo. You can't push too much things into the box, then when people >> complain about it to be overfull and bugged request them to fix it, I don't >> think it can work that way, at this scale of changes. In the other, this is >> not really what happen here, I very likely exaggerate this trait but you >> get the idea. >> >> For example, I developed DrGeo for several years on P3. Why sticking to >> P3? It gave me the opportunity to fine craft DrGeo to be stable and >> predictable in the way it behaves to its end users, and a lot of releases >> occurred. When I started to look at porting to newer image last June, I >> realized DrGeo will become unstable and oversized, so can of turning from >> A+ grade to a D- grade, just by the magic of porting it. My plan was to >> port it during the summer to get it ready end of August to deploy in local >> schools, it does not happen. And I can write it: it is s-u-p-e-r >> f-r-u-s-t-r-a-t-i-n-g. Is it normal when porting code? I don't know, I am a >> casual developer, but it makes developing well crafted and reliable Pharo >> application a bit expensive to my taste. To such a scale that I started to >> evaluate alternative to Pharo as the underneath system, idea I finally gave >> up after several weeks of evaluations. All in all I still have this felling >> Pharo is not developer friendly, I fell DrGeo is not secure there. See when >> porting to newer image, I end up using P7-32bits alpha on Linux because it >> was the most comfortable situation comparing to P5/P6/P6.1, is it not >> strange? >> >> In the other hand this struggle occurs at image change. Ok, may be it is >> a pattern specific to Smalltalk. Is it the case with commercial Smalltalk >> vendors? > > > Hi Hilaire, > > Thanks for articulating this. I've been mostly watching Pharo rather than > using it, so I haven't been affected by the changes between versions. With > respect to commercial products versus Pharo *at the present time*, I > think we have different driving forces shaping things. > > In my opinion, VA Smalltalk has been the one most strongly driven by the > importance of backward compatibility and ease of migration to a new > version. VisualWorks has been pretty good about providing a path forward > with minimal pain, although the more major version numbers difference, the > harder it is to transition. Likewise, GemStone/S has a strong emphasis on > keeping our customers' existing applications running with minimal changes. > > That being said, I have no doubt that the earliest versions of all these > products had substantial incompatibilities between versions. I am also > pretty sure there is a threshold beyond which the adoption of Pharo in > business applications will compel Pharo development to facilitate migration > to newer versions and to better maintain API compatibility. [And that may > be simply because, as more businesses rely on Pharo, they will be > financially supporting its development.] > You would expect this be a natural progression as more companies supporting such priorities join the consortium. The corollary is that its better the take greater leaps earlier when there is a greater percentage of Innovators and Early Adopters who are willing to ride some rough edges for the benefit they gain *now*. When the Majority arrive, such changes would be more disruptive to perception of Pharo i.e. more opinons, less care. cheers -ben > > A second consideration is the size of the product teams (measured in > full-time staffing). I think the commercial products had a much larger > staffing in their early days than Pharo has even now. And I think the > consequence of that is that the changes between v1 and v2 or between v2 and > v3 of the commercial products *may* have been comparable to the > differences between Pharo v(n) and v(n+3). > > > Richard > > >> >> Hilaire >> >> -- >> Dr. Geo >> http://drgeo.eu >> >> >> >> >
