Hi Esteban,
seconding your points, it is important to acknowledge why a solid Pharo core is important and worth striving towards even if it can be painful. First, read Bret Victor's reflection on Doug Englebart:
http://worrydream.com/#!/Engelbart
He makes the case that the vision that drove Englebart was important to how he realized things, giving the specific example of how his video conferencing system was fundamentally different than today's screen sharing technology. Today's screen sharing is basically a nice hack onto an existing single user system. Simply doing what Englebart did would require a lot of restructuring at the foundation. With Pharo, we have the possibility to really build / refactor from the ground up, building a fundamentally better foundation, ultimately making cool things possible. For my own work, I'm excited about the possibility of building a new multi-touch implementation from the ground up. That said, the current Pharo foundations have a number of problems for me:
(1) Graphics are still based on BitBlt, which is slow and ugly. Moving over to Athens will address this. While I have successfully used Athens graphics, I still get VM crashes (which are probably due to Athens as I did not get the crashes beforehand).
(2) Sound does not really work. On 64-bit linux, I can't simply play a recorded file as the sound plug-ins really only work for a 32-bit system.
(3) Event handling does not get touch events. I've hacked this so far but a sustainable solution would be great.
(4) Packages do not facilitate transfer of resources. For my purposes, I need to add images and sound to a package. This is not really possible right now.
I am willing to help on these problems for the community but sometimes I need support, especially when C code is necessary, rather than Pharo code. For instance, if I could get a VM that gives me raw touch events into Pharo, I could take (3) from there. I'd also be willing to work on (4) but I could use some help. One intimidating part is that there are so many package managers for Pharo. It might be nice if we simplified down to one: the right one.
Anyway, you can count me in for some contribution back to Pharo core but I might need some support from Pharo central and it won't happen for at least another month as I'm just getting set up in the new location (e.g., no access to a multi-touch device).
Cheers,
Jeff