> On Dec 12, 2015, at 18:45, horrido <horrido.hobb...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Yes, the mentality of Pharo has not escaped my attention. > > This mentality says that "if you build it, they will come." Keep improving > the platform and eventually people will find it. **Or not.** You don't > really care. (As an aside, **how** will they find it???)
You are ignoring the fact that Pharo is being taught in multiple universities and people like Stef and have made many ‘evangelization’ talks and ‘beginner’ courses in different places. There are screencasts being made and blog posts being written by various people and pushed on hacker news sites (all occasionally), plus other publicity work that escapes me at the moment. It would be great to be able to do more, but our resources are extremely limited. Sadly, that’s just the way it is and instead of complaining about it we go and do what we do best. For some this is coding, for other this is documenting (had a look at books.pharo.org lately?), for others this is evangelizing. > This mentality sequesters Pharo within its boutique or clubhouse. The tool > is used only by a limited cadre of exuberant fans, and outsiders, while > they're welcome to join, *will not be missed if they go elsewhere*. The goal of Pharo is not to conquer all programmers and programming tasks. This is not a religion, nor the next startup that will revolutionize the world. We cannot be everything to everybody, so yes the people that choose to go elsewhere will not be missed. I prefer to spend my limited resources to where I can have a positive impact. > This mentality says that the *size* of the Pharo community is not especially > important. Big, small, or medium...you don't really care, as long as > *you're* having a good time with Pharo. The problem with this mentality is > that **a healthy library ecosystem is dependent upon a user community that > grows large enough to support it**. Side is not everything. Actually the user community *is* large for the niche product that we have, but much much more important than that is that it is very *active*. I am involved in other communities that are huge but where *nothing* happens (e.g. ROS). We have a good set of base libraries that are actually quite well maintained and the community is very helpful when issues crop up (again, compared to e.g. ROS). > In other words, until the user community reaches **critical mass**, a strong > library ecosystem will not develop. Without a strong ecosystem, the breadth > of applicability to various problem domains is severely limited. > > Why would you want to limit the breadth of applicability of a programming > language? Especially one that purports to be **general purpose**. Give us the money and the influence that e.g. Sun had for Java, or Microsoft for C# or .net, or Apple for Objective C and Swift. Sure we would not have the limits that you speak of. But we are not that. We have *no* resources, compared to what these giants have. So, again, with the limited resources we are doing all that we can, and *having an impact* e.g. http://pharo.org/success On a personal note, your mail sounds accusing and it hurts when I read it, which is why I responded. We are doing what we can with the resources that we have. If you want a positive effect, an outreached hand will yield much better results than a pointing finger. ---> Save our in-boxes! http://emailcharter.org <--- Johan Fabry - http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry PLEIAD and RyCh labs - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile
