On 20.09.2009, at 13:49, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
They probably moved while we got stuck.
It's like with money: there is an "inflation" of constant progression. Everthing gets better slowly but constantly. Over 10 years, this results in quite some progress. Especially as you get the effect of "compound interest": By making something a little bit better, the next step of making it again a little bit better gets a little bit easier. As with compound interest, the effect is non-linear and completely against human intuition.
This is all the story behind pharo: moving again.
What one needs to ask is always: How great could a system be over time if one would just do the next trivial, tiny, small step? And that over 10 years? With Squeak, this was impossible. Every small improvement was directly criticised as beeing "not good enough" and thus not worthwile for Squeak. With that attitude you go nowhere. As was proven in 10 years with Squeak. Of course, you should not *just* do tiny improvements. But it's like investing: there might be the chance to buy some pre-ipo stock cheap in the future. Does that mean that I put the money under the bed for no interest, or do I invest it for some tiny percentage e.g in a money-market account the meantime? With Squeak, the community decided that doing nothing was the right thing. Marcus -- Marcus Denker - http://marcusdenker.de PLEIAD Lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile