I used to think my current situation in life was as a sum total of all my previous environments, mistakes and experiences etc.. ie. that my past has determined my present. Then I learned somewhere about positive visualization and intention and how once you get a clear picture of your desired future, it makes it really easy to decide what you need to do today in order to work towards your desired future. ie. your desired future determines your present. The trick is getting a clear picture of your desired future. To this point you have done what you have done. Now, to my mind at least, if you could work out a way to bring the Squeak Trunk and Pharo forks, and other developments like Keith's important work with Sake/Packages and Bob the Builder, together so that so terribly much effort is not being wasted doing the same things over and over again, you will really have accomplished something. And remember too that the most important thing you can give your children is your undivided time and attention. All too soon they will be grown up and on their own. If you find yourself often saying things like, "Not now, Daddy's too busy.", pretty soon you will find they will stop coming around. Ken G. Brown At 9:37 PM +0100 1/6/10, pharo-project-request@lists.gforge.inria.fr apparently wrote:
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 21:13:24 +0100 From: St?phane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr> Subject: [Pharo-project] About my recursive blues :) To: "Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr Development" <Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr> Message-ID: <B0480EF9-3F1E-4B48-A4FE-A31834C97557@inria.fr> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Hi guys
Sometimes I'm not in good mood. Today I was in a bad bad mood. Quite bad even badder. I was wondering why I was doing all that and the rest. What was the use to do Pharo if we get Squeak doing exactly the same - Ok we were right long time ago but still seeing all the removal of crappy code we begged to be removed and got bashed for and also doing all that effort and seeing it redone was not helping. Being right sometimes is not even cool :) So a plain bad day.... cold and rainy. I was frustrated that I cannot be somebody else, doing stuff full time and no other duties and going faster. In short nothing was working and I was a frustation ball like I'm good at being.
But my kids were there and we had to go swimming! After going swimming and not thinking then thinking and discussing with some remote friends and emails. (Thanks guys you know who you are) also thinking about other people's attention and remarks in other contexts, my good mood came back even stronger than before because I came up to the conclusion that my remote friends were right (BTW thanks pharoers some of you inspire me today during my bad mood - alain, henrik, danny, lukas...) So what is the conclusion of all that?
- I have a cool job (one of the best research positions in europe - not easy everyday but cool and with people supporting me with my crazy idea....imagine coding in smalltalk building an international team doing smalltalkish stuff).
- we can invest for 5 years or even 10. Close your eyes and imagine we can decide now what we want to do now for the next 10 years and do it because we decided that this is fun. Amazing. No clients, no venture guys telling us the truth of life.
- To a friend to which I was saying that I'm not that smart, that guy told me that smart is not the only measure: you can measure your impact, the books you wrote, the energy that other people took and got inspired and all kind of other measures.... :)
So I can tell you I was down but this is good because I could think about what I really want to do. And I want to have an innovative Smalltalk system that can be used to develop business and innovative. (for example I would like to see if the new event system can be used to save Genie - one of the coolest handwriting recognition system I see). So I will not be extra-smart but I will learn and I will do it bit by bit. And I want to make it fun and beautiful. May be we will be able to go faster (it depends mainly on you guys :)) but I want 10 years or 15 or even 20 years of fun with a cool system and it is there in my hand (at three keystrokes from my keuboard). We will build it.
Stef (sorry for the one of you that have to listen my bad mood I'm curing myself).