***great*** story. Stef PS: You must read "2000/12 - Kamigami no Itadaki - Le Sommet des Dieux" from jiro taniguchi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Taniguchi this is 1800 pages manga on alpinists and himalaya. I thought it would be dead boring but this is excellent. Once you french is ready you can lend it for free in the public library. On Dec 17, 2009, at 5:15 PM, Marcus Denker wrote:
However they didn't want to be involved in the politics, and I cant say I blame them.
So let's see, what where our options last year?
1. Take over Squeak (just like Andreas did now) 2. Just step aside and do a fork. 3. Nicely ask to be involved with 3.11
1) was not possible. In 3.9, both Stef and me where in the Board. (We should not that we foundet it...) But Stef left in disgust as it became clear the people there were not willing to do *anything*. And I did not seek re-election after the community made it clear that they did not like our work on 3.9. (and there was a PhD Thesis to write...)
As for 3: the community chose you to do 3.11! And it was made clear to us that we did everything wrong with 3.9. And everyone seemed happy to do what Squeakers do best: Discuss while doing nothing.
The other thing then is etoys... we put some effort into etoys in 3.9 (merge with squeakland.org, merge with Diego's SmallLand which was the largest etoy installation at that point). But no child ever used it. There was no interaction with the people who worked (payed!!) on etoys *at all*.
And it was clear that an etoys in Pharo would never be used. So why keep it? Especially as etoys is really not easy to maintain. (I personally rate it as unmaintainable. It's a mess of epic proportion). It's not an asset. It's a liability. But Squeak without etoys is not Squeak. So another name is quite the right thing to do, no?
Than, why do we need something like Pharo anyway? The reason is that we used Squeak it *every* *single* *day*. We used Squeak for teaching, we used it do do research. Phd Students used it, Master Students used it. People that left the university started to use it in their company.
So, I am a Researcher, and my point of view of "Why Pharo" is this:
Doing Research is like exploring a mountain. A high mountain, the peak is covered in clouds, no idea where exactly it is an just how high the peak is... yet it's there. And you *want* to get there.
So what would you do in this situation? There are four approaches:
1) Talk about The Peak, but don't do anything until someone invents a magical peak discovery device.
2) Go up. As far as you can. Do not waste time with acquiring good equipment, do not build camps. (building a camps is not your goal! the peak is!)
3) Go up. But while doing it, start to note how to improve your equipment. Seek good spots for putting up camps and storage for food. You will not find the peak this time. But you have learned a lot. You know where to put a camp. You know how to stock it. You know what equipment would simplify the next try. So you spend some energy... and haul up stuff to the secure place and build a camp. For sure, the next expedition can go *far far* higher!
4) Just build equipment down in the valley. Don't go up before it's perfect!
So, I don't know what you would do. I would do 3). It has some really boring components, this Plan 3. Hauling stuff up the mountain is not fun. It's not glorious. And there are no Sherpas to hire. In Research at the University, there are no engineers. The PhD-Students and Researchers need to cary everything themselves... not working together, not having fun together while doing will mean that you can't do it.
So Pharo, up to now, is just that: Hauling equipment and food up the mountain to form a stabilized camp. It's not really that high. (other expeditions are laughing: "This is a trivial. What idiots. They have no Vision"). But they have *no camp* at all. And as soon as ours is ready, we rest, and than we build the next... and the next, and the next. Higher and Higher up.
I always wonder how high we would already be (with lots of equipment and well-rested), if we would have used this strategy the last 10 years for Squeak. But we did not.
VPRI is doing 2). The Squeak community prefers 1). Squeak 3.11 was 4).
But I fear, the magic device will never be discovered... and Squeak died in 3.11 because there was no visible artifact.
And starting all the time from the bottom is just not going to work (it did in the 70ties, when hills where small... Dan wrote a paper about it even... but with the mountains of today, no way...).
So... back to haulin' more stuff....
Marcus
-- Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de
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