Douglas Brebner wrote:
>
> I feel the Pharo people deserve a beer for lighting a fire under the
> Squeak community and getting people motivated :)
>   
The Squeak community was motivated before Pharo, and lots of work has
been done in the past couple of years outside of Pharo to improve squeak
for use in a commercial environment. My own contribution to this includes:

Installer - DSL for building images
SUnit-improved
SSpec
TestReporter - Text based SUnit runner
MC1.5 - merge of all forks of MC
MC1.5 Orphanage - out of order loading
MC1.5 - extensions and overrides actually work.
MC1.6 - initial coding for Atomic Loading
Sake - aka. make/rake for squeak
Sake/Packages - replace universes
Bob1 (in ruby)
Sake/Bob - automatic build/test server
Logging
LevelPlayingField

If that lot don't constitute motivation, I don't know what does.

What pharo managed to do was demotivate several people who had
contributed, and their contributions were summarily ignored.

For example, I regard the fact that Pharo started with 3.9 when there
was no reason why they could not have started with 3.10, as a
significant insult to Edgar and the rest of us that put lots of effort
into 3.10.

As a second example I consider the fact that Pharo refuses to adopt or
contribute to MC1.5 with a view to adoption. MC1.5 included a merge of
several MC forks, and common tools are essential for cross fertilisation
within the community. I take their actions as a demonstration that they
are not interested in being community players or working with any
broader community vision that I we or anyone might propose.

We had a golden opportunity for the community to work together on the
important tools, and the Pharo guys will not play ball, they will not
join with any vision other than their own. This has the effect of
DEMOTIVATING folks like myself who would like to see all of the
community work together, and have been working towards that end for over
3 years.

They will not contribute to any of the above projects that are
maintained in public repositories as a community resource. Instead they
retain their own forks of SUnit and MC, etc.

This has driven me to the point of not being motivated to continue to
contribute to MC, because the Pharo team are effectively vetoing the
adoption of any future enhancements.  I cannot take pharo seriously as a
commercial development tool, when it uses MC1 which doesn't cope with
method extensions or overrides. (fine if you are in you ivory tower and
writing your own code from scratch, but a nightmare if you try to patch
up and maintain code that is not your own)

In summary, I have regrettably discovered and continue to maintain that
the attitude of the Pharo team is very rude indeed. I have pondered
whether this is a cultural thing (i.e. traditionally the French and
English don't get along). I have discussed it with my non coding friends
and others and I have not managed to come to any other constructive
conclusion.

So in conclusion, I personally regard pharo as a small academic research
project being carried out on behalf of the smalltalk community. It's
only valuable output will be the MIT licenced code that they produce.
The lack of social skills in the pharo team is only surpassed by my own.
As such this renders the pharo vision useless to any bigger concept of
shared objective or values, and that's what I think squeak is really all
about.

Keith