2014-08-18 6:55 GMT-03:00 phil@highoctane.be <phil@highoctane.be>:

I'd say that we now have: Camillo - pissed off to death Ben - same Nico - gone

There is something amiss there.

These people are significant contributors and made the system move forward in new and much needed directions (Zeroconf/CommandLine, Spec, Amber). Pissing them off is really a bad approach, no matter why/how/... Get the house in order please and stop the ego trips. Yelling at people/each other just doesn't work and doesn't help. Try that at your cat.

In my own interest I'd like all parties settle down and continue working to make Pharo advance. Pharo should advance whether people love or hate Stephane (or whoever is in the board).

Oh, yeah, it helps in pushing great people to other communities... As we needed that.

And now, I am feeling sad.

Same feeling here. We can't afford losing valuable contributors. But also if this is the result of something, it is not very different to how Pharo started (and also other "forks" not only in the Smalltalk community).

At the same time, none of this kind of thing ever prevented progress. I guess you can remember the dual hierarchies in previous version of Pharo... Pharo itself came to life because we wanted progress. Now, we attract people who want to do things differently. And then are surprised that they want to do just that. Who got named "Random Refactorers"? Remember that? And calling people names?

How I see it, Pharo as a project is in a perpetual struggle about what you mention, because: A) It is building everything it can to let new developers flourish without a central authority B) It still is "design by committee" at a large extent. The outcome of this struggle is going to be next turning point (for better or for worse). Progress in point A is evident, and I can understand why B is still current (community size). Nowadays it feels "ministerial" a lot , and it's our own fault to look to Pharo (as an organization) every time we have a need. A "take it or leave it" situation. Or more like "a take it or fork it" ;-) Esteban A. Maringolo

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 9:58 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:

@ Phil

Yes, I am sad as well, this is not how it should be. I really liked each of them a lot.

Now, whenever people collaborate there will be conflicts, this is inevitable. A conflict is often complex, has always two sides to it, and a long history (it is not just about one thing right now, most of the history is unknown to us, lots of personal things come into play as well). How conflicts are dealt with (or left festering) is what counts. haro is not about one person, it is an open source community. It is not good to generalise and hold the community hostage, or hurt it deliberately - this goes against the very thing you contributed selflessly to in the first place.

We have a rudimentary mechanism to deal with conflicts, it is called the board:

<from the website>

The board

Pharo has a board composed of Marcus Denker, Stephane Ducasse, Sven Van Caekenberghe, Tudor Gîrba and Esteban Lorenzano.

The role of the board is to make decisions if in the future the community can't decide on a course of action.

</from the website>

Even if the conflict involves a board member, the board should play its role. If necessary, individual board members can be contacted. This has not happened.

Let's remember that for the next case.

@ Ben

I am sad and sorry about you leaving. You will be missed and I thank you for all you did. I hope that maybe one day we will hear from you again.

I remember that young student coming in with all this energy, writing a new code browser, Nautilus, from scratch, and doing Spec along the way - it was a herculean task. You did great work and we all benefit from it.

@ Camillo

Iden ditto: you leaving makes me really sad and I will miss you - thank you for everything you did. I hope we'll meet again.

I have fond memories about meeting you during sprints starting in the old INRIA building. Your enthusiasm was really contagious, there was no task you would not want to tackle. You rewrote the book for Pharo for command line handling, issue tracking, issue validation, git integration, the eye inspector, source/change file compaction and so much more. You have a great sense of good design, we're all better for it.

Peace,

Sven

On 18 Aug 2014, at 11:55, phil@highoctane.be wrote:

...

I'd say that we now have:

Camillo - pissed off to death Ben - same Nico - gone

There is something amiss there.

These people are significant contributors and made the system move forward in new and much needed directions (Zeroconf/CommandLine, Spec, Amber).

Pissing them off is really a bad approach, no matter why/how/... Get the house in order please and stop the ego trips. Yelling at people/each other just doesn't work and doesn't help. Try that at your cat.

Oh, yeah, it helps in pushing great people to other communities... As we needed that.

And now, I am feeling sad.

Phil

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 11:36 AM, Tudor Girba <tudor@tudorgirba.com> wrote: Hi Ben,

Thanks for letting us know.

I am sorry you feel this way, but I believe your presentation of the situation is both unfair and unfortunate. You are obviously referring to issues that are of personal nature, and as outsiders we are left with only an ugly feeling without being able to either understand or fix anything.

I was actually having fun until your email, and as far as I can tell, others were having fun as well. I am not sure what the intention of your email was, but at least for me, your mail did manage to spoil the fun for a second.

I appreciate the work you put in Pharo, I respect your decision, but I do not sympathize with your behavior.

Good luck, Doru

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 8:38 AM, Benjamin < benjamin.vanryseghem.pharo@gmail.com> wrote: Hello guys,

I am sending this email to explain why I am quiting the Pharo community, as well as the Smalltalk community.

I can not bear Stephane Ducasse's behavior anymore whether at a public level or a private level.

It seems that his ego is preventing him from being able to have a discussion without overreacting, being agressive, or insulting.

I can not approve how Stephane is constantly talking behind my back to unleash his irrationnal wrath and to provide his very own version of the facts.

I can not see how this can lead to a peaceful and respectful community where we can all have fun building a future.

Therefore I will not be part of this project anymore, since the way Stephane is acting is taking away all the fun I can have interacting with all of you.

It was a hard decision to take, but I can not be part of a community led by someone whose behaviour is going against all my principles.

I wish to all of you to have fun, and keep me in touch if you want to have a beer someday ;)

Ben

-- www.tudorgirba.com

"Every thing has its own flow"

P.S. regardless.. about the subject, so, now Here's an example nil asValueHolder shall be refactored to nil asReactiveVariable ? sounds like a plan :) ==== And yes, Ben, you are wrong, if you consider this as a personal attack. This code smells, to say it politely. But i prefer to call it crap. When i see such things, the only thing, which comes to my mind is: 'when the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as nail'. But this is example to show you that when your college says "you're wrong" it don't actually means "i hate you and you should leave". You should probably learn to make a difference between "fundamentalist's hatred" towards bad code/design decisions, and "hatred based on personal basis". Because i do, and while i hate bad code, and can explode with curses & blasphemy, it doesn't means that i am targeting its author. No, it is just the code. I am really miss your company and your sense of humor. To my opinion, you was a part of what was making a great atmosphere in our team, at least for me. Too bad, that you decided to leave, instead of standing and fighting, defending your opinion and proving it right. Because this is what i would do, considering the amount of energy i put into it, and based on honest and strong will to make it even better. -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.

No great things are achieved without great characters, Stephan has been doing a great long term effort of maintaining research budgets for Smalltalk and pushing a viable open source solution for it while the situation was pretty difficult. Like many of us he has some rough edges to and we shouldn’t forget that each of us is driven by ambition, fear and frustration. I really respect Stephan, but I also sympathise with you as I did with Janko some month’s ago. Nobody cares about any details, what we do care about however is that you would be lost for Smalltalk after such a great job !!!! There is so much more to Smalltalk then just Pharo and some of these move considerably …. Hope you reconsider at least that part of your decision. Take care, @+Maarten, On 18 Aug 2014, at 11:36, Tudor Girba <tudor@tudorgirba.com> wrote:

Hi Ben,

Thanks for letting us know.

I am sorry you feel this way, but I believe your presentation of the situation is both unfair and unfortunate. You are obviously referring to issues that are of personal nature, and as outsiders we are left with only an ugly feeling without being able to either understand or fix anything.

I was actually having fun until your email, and as far as I can tell, others were having fun as well. I am not sure what the intention of your email was, but at least for me, your mail did manage to spoil the fun for a second.

I appreciate the work you put in Pharo, I respect your decision, but I do not sympathize with your behavior.

Good luck, Doru

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 8:38 AM, Benjamin <benjamin.vanryseghem.pharo@gmail.com> wrote: Hello guys,

I am sending this email to explain why I am quiting the Pharo community, as well as the Smalltalk community.

I can not bear Stephane Ducasse's behavior anymore whether at a public level or a private level.

It seems that his ego is preventing him from being able to have a discussion without overreacting, being agressive, or insulting.

I can not approve how Stephane is constantly talking behind my back to unleash his irrationnal wrath and to provide his very own version of the facts.

I can not see how this can lead to a peaceful and respectful community where we can all have fun building a future.

Therefore I will not be part of this project anymore, since the way Stephane is acting is taking away all the fun I can have interacting with all of you.

It was a hard decision to take, but I can not be part of a community led by someone whose behaviour is going against all my principles.

I wish to all of you to have fun, and keep me in touch if you want to have a beer someday ;)

Ben

-- www.tudorgirba.com

"Every thing has its own flow" _______________________________________________ Esug-list mailing list Esug-list@lists.esug.org http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 12:20 PM, stepharo <stepharo@free.fr> wrote:

Ben,

I'm sad about your decision and I think that it is a bit biaised against me. Your statements are your point of view and I will not argue with you.

Now for the others I got a disagreement on the rename of ValueHolder into ReactiveVariable (see my reasons below) as referred here - https://github.com/spec-framework/spec/issues/16 - https://pharo.fogbugz.com/default.asp?13824

I let you judge.

This thread is also useful and Nice raises the legacy issue: http://forum.world.st/COTDC-108-NewValueHolder-td4738066.html

For me the picture at the end of https://pharo.fogbugz.com/ default.asp?13824 tells a lot on your state of mind and I do not think that this is a good state of mind to work in an open-source community.

Would there be a way to get a two-way apology/shake of hands by getting carried too far on a minor concern and move on from there? Feelings have been hurt. No one ever heals from misplaced pride and ego issues. Life is short.

I think that we can have disagreements with other people and we can discuss but it seems that it became difficult to discuss with you recently and this is sad. (Members of the rmod team still did not get why you left the team without saying bye to them).

Here are my reasons:

- I do not want that people can say that innovation in Pharo is just by renaming existing concepts. The concept of ValueHolder is the basis of VisualWorks. Spec is influenced by the application model of VisualWorks and valueHolder. So using this name is recognizing its influence. When people using VW will come to Pharo they should not think that too and they should not get lost.

- Stephan Eggermont mentioned in addition that - Reactive variable is a concept from reactive programming. For the record - Value Holder is a pattern described by Bobby Woolf in 1994 in http://c2.com/ppr/vmodels.html and referred to in much of the pattern literature.

- The books of X. Briffault, Bernard Horan, Tim Howard, Ivan Tomek, plus all the tutorial and docs of VisualWorks are using ValueHolder. Probably more but I did not have the time to check.

- I programmed since some of you in VW since 1998 and telling that the books we used are obsolete does not help because there are still accurate.

- Now if Spec would be an external library that can be loaded in Pharo, I would not care and you could use any name want. But Spec is part of Pharo and Spec is based on my ideas too. So I would a bit of care to be taken.

I imagine that you can understand my point. I really wish I would not have to write such mail. I'm immensely sad.

There is a powerful movement going on with all things "Reactive". (Meteor comes to mind). Of course, ppl want to get these things. Especially in the UI space like Spec. Younger guns are of course drawn to it. It is hopeless to think that there will be no tension there. And yes, we are a kind of fashion industry. Isn't Pharo going to be innovative and taking in the new stuff ? ValueHolder is a known thing. It is frankly not more sensical that ReactiveVariable. Of course, now, we understand it. But when it first started, it could have been a lot of other names. In Java, it is an interface... http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/api/javax/faces/component/ValueHolder.html Look at Seaside's DynamicVariables... not that super clear when encountered at first. Are they really what Lisp calls Dynamic Variables? In 3.0 NewValueHolder is with this in the class comment: / ! \ IMPORTANT / ! \ NewValueHolder will soon be replaced by ReactiveVariable ============================================= Within Spec itself, NewValueHolder has been renamed to ReactiveVariable (during the beta phase of Pharo 3). Since Pharo 3 was already in beta, NewValueHolder has been kept untouched. For new code (and all code in future versions of Pharo), use the following two hook methods: asReactiveVariable - use wherever you would have used asValueHolder, which will soon be deprecated. For now, it returns a NewValueHolder. In the future it will return a (polymorphic) ReactiveVariable selectionReactiveVariable - as above, returns a SelectionValueHolder for now. This extension method allows the two different packages to coexist without having direct references from the Spec model. ... A variable that emits announcements when changed looks quite reactive indeed. Of course a couple of things are using the NewValueHolder (Roassal2Spec, GT-Inspector) But subclasses of NewValueHolder: CollectionValueHolder, DictonaryValueHolder, IdentityNewValueHolder (yikes!), SelectionValueHolder This is confusing. At the same time, none of this kind of thing ever prevented progress. I guess you can remember the dual hierarchies in previous version of Pharo... Pharo itself came to life because we wanted progress. Now, we attract people who want to do things differently. And then are surprised that they want to do just that. Who got named "Random Refactorers"? Remember that? And calling people names? https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/squeak/conversations/messages/109404

Related links: - https://github.com/spec-framework/spec/issues/16 - https://pharo.fogbugz.com/default.asp?13824

Yeah, the pic at the end is an ad hominem. There is a ton of such things. http://coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/ Too bad we ended up on http://coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/erist38.htm so fast.

On Spec itself, we got good stuff. Like docs. http://spec.st/ And getting this to go GPLv3 is going to hurt. https://github.com/spec-framework/spec/blob/master/LICENSE-GPL3 MIT is a big plus for Pharo tech. This is a bad precedent. Phil

On 18/8/14 08:38, Benjamin wrote:

...

Hello guys,

I am sending this email to explain why I am quiting the Pharo community, as well as the Smalltalk community.

I can not bear Stephane Ducasse's behavior anymore whether at a public level or a private level.

It seems that his ego is preventing him from being able to have a discussion without overreacting, being agressive, or insulting.

I can not approve how Stephane is constantly talking behind my back to unleash his irrationnal wrath and to provide his very own version of the facts.

I can not see how this can lead to a peaceful and respectful community where we can all have fun building a future.

Therefore I will not be part of this project anymore, since the way Stephane is acting is taking away all the fun I can have interacting with all of you.

It was a hard decision to take, but I can not be part of a community led by someone whose behaviour is going against all my principles.

I wish to all of you to have fun, and keep me in touch if you want to have a beer someday ;)

Ben

Probably not but I do not know. Now our team should not be a place that you leave without saying bye and this affected me when ben left in end of May.

Yes, this is where it all began. For the record, the name change was my idea, not Ben's. I didn't think it was controversial - more of a question. As you can see, it was discussed on the mailing list and, seeing no dissent, Ben and I pushed the change. I too was sorry to waste the time making the change, and wished someone would've spoken up on the mailing list, but I realize we can't read and respond to every mail, so I let it go and moved on. But is this really what the whole fight is about?!

----- Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Quitting-the-community-tp4773730p4773795.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

ReactiveHolder ? Phil On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 7:52 AM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda@gmail.com> wrote:

It is well to remember Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, the thesis of which is that the nature of any medium has more importance than the content if that medium in shaping its effects in the users of that medium.

On the medium side, email is devoid of nuance, unless smattered with emoticons, themselves a very limited sub-medium that many of us employ only partially. It is /so/ common to see an escalation of hurt emerge from an email thread started by a misreading of an email that imputed offense when none was intended.

On the message side, names are important. Sentences become incomprehensible if nouns are arbitrarily rebound. ValueHolder may not be the greatest name, just as apareille a photo is clumsier than camera, but we can't just change them to frotboggle or bungswallop just because they sound more poetic. ReactiveVariable is criticizes me on the basis that it is an object that contains a variable, not a variable itself, and garner misleading, /and/ that it is a renaming of an (albeit imperfectly) already named concept, ValueHolder, and if one doesn't want to unnecessarily break others' understanding and much older Pharo and non-Pharo code that uses it one is better leaving sleeping dogs lie.

HTH Eliot (phone)

On Aug 18, 2014, at 8:38 AM, Benjamin < benjamin.vanryseghem.pharo@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hello guys,

I am sending this email to explain why I am quiting the Pharo community, as well as the Smalltalk community.

I can not bear Stephane Ducasse's behavior anymore whether at a public level or a private level.

It seems that his ego is preventing him from being able to have a discussion without overreacting, being agressive, or insulting.

I can not approve how Stephane is constantly talking behind my back to unleash his irrationnal wrath and to provide his very own version of the facts.

I can not see how this can lead to a peaceful and respectful community where we can all have fun building a future.

Therefore I will not be part of this project anymore, since the way Stephane is acting is taking away all the fun I can have interacting with all of you.

It was a hard decision to take, but I can not be part of a community led by someone whose behaviour is going against all my principles.

I wish to all of you to have fun, and keep me in touch if you want to have a beer someday ;)

Ben

Torsten Bergmann wrote

I personally would keep ValueHolder as it is a well known concept

Although it's extremely corollary to the purpose of this thread, since it keeps coming up, I just want to remind that the point of the original ValueHolder-rename discussion (in which no one said "let's keep ValueHolder") was that a quick google search seemed to show that "Value Holder" does NOT mean what we're using it to mean. ----- Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Quitting-the-community-tp4773730p4773842.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.