On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 11:28 PM Stephane Ducasse <stepharo.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
> https://youtu.be/keCwRdbwNQY > > I would love to have $ to market Pharo but I like this talk > > Stef > > Let's be sincere here, there would have been no Apple without Steve. Ironically even Steve was not aware of his massive importance. When he was asked about Windows share on the OS market and what hope MacOS has battling a Goliath that Microsoft is , Steve said that there could be no competition and no hope other than increasing the shared from 3% at the time to 5% the next 5 years. MacOS increased its share to 10% instead and when everyone predicted that macs are no longer the focus of the company, Apple smelled the roses and saw that maybe OS market is not as hopeless as they initially thought. As a result we had the 5k iMac , a computer that costed at its release as much it costed to get the monitor alone and then the iMac pro. Truth is that known really knows the market, not even Steve, none can really predict it and none can really manipulate it. Its made for humans by humans and so its influenced by the chaos that is called human emotion. However I agree with Steve. If you have to choose between 1 billion dollars or the ability to greatly inspire people, you will be foolish to pick the first. Personally I think a big obstacle for Pharo is not money but this part. If one opens Pharo without knowing anything about it , his first reaction will be "so what ?". Why ? Because there is no obvious thing to inspire. Pharo ability to inspire requires a deep introduction to the language and considerably experience till you get at least the basics. This is our greatest weakness. We have prioritized coder productivity and we have sacrificed smooth learning curve. Meaning there is a lot of friction to be introduced to Pharo but once you do and learn the basics its easy to fall in love with the whole ideology that Pharo is. Frankly Pharo has improved this already, Squeak was a mess and Pharo did a lot of clean up. Unfortunately smooth learning curve is a secondary priority and this will be growing issue the more complex Pharo becomes and let's face it Pharo is a very complex environment already. So sorry Stef , you know I don't have an issue admiring when you are correct but in this one you are very wrong. Python had no money at all, actually I am willing to bet it had less than Pharo, but Python offered this super smooth learning curve and it now dominates the programming field. Ironically I think Pharo would have been a far better choice in this field. Why ? - The language is much easier and simpler - We got a much better VM with far higher performance - We have a proper IDE that is fully open source, free and only one, instead of a thousand variants of the same thing etc. Also as the video implied it does not matter how much money you throw at marketing. Many companies throw a ton of money and they get close to nothing in return. It's extremely hard to buy inspiration, you either have it , or you don't. Ironically I am writting this lines on my iMac using Windows. I am a Windows hater but I got to admit, Microsoft seems to finally get the message, not only the open sourced .NET which make a huge part of Windows they also made Windows 10 far more stable , slick and well designed. Windows 10 may become the only version of Windows I manage to like. I am sure it's not because they throw more money to it. More like they throw more brains to it.
