Richard, My post was somewhat in response to your campaign, but not trying to discourage you.�� Its just providing some counterpoint to consider in the big picture. Maybe I should not of posted another opinion piece so soon on top of the other threads, so probably even though you can pick holes in my answers to your questions, some advance notice I'm going to _try_ limiting further followups to let things settle down a bit.

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 5:08 AM, horrido <horrido.hobbies@gmail.com> wrote:
So let me see if I understand this...

Pharo is not ready for prime time because it's still gestating?

For some (the early adopters) Pharo is already ready for prime time.�� People are doing successful business with Pharo now!�� Successful enough to want to be paying members of the Pharo Consortium.
��
At what��point will Pharo be ready for everyone in the world to use?
Five years from��now? Ten years?

I agree with your implication.�� It is not beneficial to treat Pharo as unready-for-the-masses for an extended period.�� Now PG says you need:

�� �� 1) a free implementation - Got it! Pharo's MIT license.

�� �� 2) something to hack - Got it! There is the IDE itself, the PBE develops a game, and there is a broad base of open source applications and libraries.��

�� �� 3) a book - Currently we have��only��half of this. We have a very good book in PBE, but it is outdated several years.�� Early adopters and existing Pharo users can work around this, but for potential incoming masses, an up to date book is a critical aspect.�� There is current activity to update PBE for Pharo 4 (and now I realise I should help with it��more, Thanks for clarifying my thinking on this.) ��To bring in the masses before this update is ready I believe could do more harm than good.�� It would be embarrassing and a great disappointed to push a campaign generating an influx of users that end up criticizing this aspect, and missing the chance for them to experience the value of Pharo - and you might only get one chance to create a good impression. ��

So for me, right now PBE for Pharo 4 is the critical dependency before pushing a big advertising agenda, with a plan to align such with the Pharo 4 release.��

In addition, I consider running on pure 64-bit OS to be critical to gain credibility in the wider community.�� In my conservative view, for outside consumption I don't think its critical this be completed for Pharo 4, but aligning the release of a technology preview would be very nice.��
��

And when it is ready for the world to use, can we be sure that the world
will use it? "If you build it, they will come." Really??

That is a null point.�� That would be the same in ten years, five years and today.�� Besides, we are also building Pharo for ourselves.�� Indeed, "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch. [1] " ��Of course we want Pharo to grow because that will help fund its improvement and sustainability.�� But I don't think we need the whole world (yet).�� That brings other complications, like maybe design by committee.�� PG says "Everyone knows that it's not a good idea to have a language designed by a committee. Committees yield bad design. But I think the worst danger of committees is that they interfere with redesign" ��and that last point is important to consider for Pharo's vision [2].

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s02.html
[2] https://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/30434/PharoVision.pdf (I think an update is in progress)
��


Have we not learned that grassroots guarantee nothing? The language
landscape is littered with dead or dying languages that failed to rise above
grassroots.

Nothing is guaranteed.�� But Pharo's steady organic growth makes me optimistic.�� My point is, Pharo has not had a BIG advertising campaign before.�� Growing organically has perhaps allowed us to get by with a few loose ends (like documentation) with the subsequent volume of newcomer questions arising from this being manageable.�� At least newcomers get a positive impression from fast response to their queries. �� A big influx a novice queries might result in either:��
* Pharo improvements delayed as the experts spend all �� delayed in improving Pharo; or
* newcomers being frustrated with questions going unanswered. ��

The advantage of organic growth is that you have a steady progression of people from novice to journeyman to master. ��"Ideally" the pool of journeyman available to answer novice questions grows at the same rate as the pool of newcomers grows.�� I consider my own journey.�� I lurked for a long while.�� Then I started contributing to the discussion.�� Of course, the easiest thing to contribute is "an opinion" -- and there is some value in that, but it doesn't actually create code. Actually it drags other coders away from their coding, so productivity goes down (so maybe sorry also for this thread).�� But its an investment in the future that hopefully the newcomer grows into a code contributor.�� At this stage I was probably a net drain (not that I noticed at the time).�� Then December 2013 there was a call for help whittling down the Issue List, so I dove in.�� The effect was I really learnt A LOT reviewing how others fixed code and getting my code fixes reviewed (and I recommend others do the same).�� So now I feel I can add more value.


The idea that hackers know, or can determine, what is a "good" language
strikes me as rather presumptuous and incorrect. And whose definition of
"good" are we using anyway?

PG says... "It may be that the majority of programmers can't tell a good language from a bad one. But that's no different with any other tool. It doesn't mean that it's a waste of time to try designing a good language. Expert hackers can tell a good language when they see one, and they'll use it. Expert hackers are a tiny minority, admittedly, but that tiny minority write all the good software, and their influence is such that the rest of the programmers will tend to use whatever language they use." ��And I guess if anyone would know, it is the founder of Y-Combinator [2] (DropBox, AirBnB, Heroku and others).

[2]��http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/26/paul-graham-37-y-combinator-companies-have-valuations-of-or-sold-for-at-least-40m/

So how do we target experts? ��
* Experts are probably more suspicious of hyperbole and cheer leading. ��
* Experts are in demand and busy - so short targeted concrete examples would be good. ��
* Maybe quickstart tutorials demonstrating foundations for different application areas��
�� ��* Web (e.g. http://zn.stfx.eu/zn/build-and-deploy-1st-webapp/)
�� ��* Games
�� ��* Business GUI��
�� ��* Business RDMS App
* Demonstrating Pharo's tight debug/compile/resume workflow
* Acknowledging past criticisms and how they have been addressed, or how times have changed (Richard I see you trying to do this, but its a hard task)

cheers -ben