Let's hire a Pharo developer

I'm new in the Smalltalk community, and even newer in Pharo.
If the following has been discussed before, I have not found it in the archives.

What do you think about hiring a developer to work exclusively and full time on Pharo?

At ESUG'09 there were about 250 people, and Smalltalks'09 had about the same number of attendees.
100 people paying €10/month yields €1000/month.
I'm not sure, but I think that it is a good salary in Argentina.

Let's take advantage (in the good sense) of the vibrant Smalltalk community in Argentina, and the actual state of the euro/peso. For europeans, €10 is about two beers.

Make it an automatic withdrawal, so once you've taken the desition, you never think about again.

I'm the first one in the list. Who else?

> I'm new in the Smalltalk community, and even newer in Pharo.
> If the following has been discussed before, I have not found it in the
> archives.
>
> What do you think about hiring a developer to work exclusively and full time
> on Pharo?

would be a nice model now I'm not sure we could get 100 paying 10 Euros a month
even if this is really tempting.


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On Dec 13, 2009, at 10:47 PM, alesch wrote:

>
> What do you think about hiring a developer to work exclusively and full time
> on Pharo?

...

> I'm the first one in the list. Who else?
>

I would be in.

But I doubt that there would be enough people who would do this.

There are many things that one would normally think would be logical to do. E.g, you
have a company that uses a plattform for all your bussiness. Wouldn't you invest into it
to secure your future? The Answer of all companies in the Squeak community the last 10
years was: "No".

Or, you are an employee at such a company. Wouldn't you want to invest a bit of time and
energy into the Plattform to make sure that, if the compay lays you off, you can find
other employment in waht you did the last X years?
The answer of all these Employees and Consultants in the Squeak Community was: "No, I am
not payed for that".

Sometimes I think there is something I fundamentally don't understand...


        Marcus




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Hi Marcus, hello to all!

You wrote:

> Sometimes I think there is something I fundamentally don't understand...

In history, the fastest growing opensource communities consisted of partly employed professionals, who invested lots of their spare time in driving a software package forwards, hoping, that, one day, there will be a payoff in terms of:

a) getting known as specialist to get hired
b) learn new concepts to make yourself or your students happier (adademic research) :-)
c) join a group to build a commercial or adequate product to found a enterprise on, become shareholder, go to stock exchange, become rich
d) mixture of above

In any case - there has to be a "coherent concept", a realistic future or idea, why one should invest into such thing on a descending branch like Smalltalk.

For Squeak/Etoys/Scratch it's quite clear. Teaching programming to children. IMHO, there is no better software to teach childen. Alan Kay as community organizer and figurehead leading a crowd of followers. There is a community of people, driving that stuff slowly, but steadily forward.

In germany its HPI investing lots into building up knowledge in Smalltalk/Squeak/EToys. Money comes from SAP founder. Very idealistic man.

The situation of Pharo reminds me a bit of Dolphin Smalltalk: Where's the customer who urgently needs such a product?

There are a lot of free competitors around: Smalltalk/X, GNU, Little, Vista ...

It's not easy to explain the differences of concepts behind those smalltalks. But it's much harder to explain, why we need to invest more time and sink more money into a (commercially) "sinking boat" of technology.

I could make out a few "trends" in software technology since some time:

* Parallel computing. (Smalltalk rather has a structure of a human brain, no chance to parallelize, wrong algorithms behind)

* In Form Matics: Bringing everything in a form of "XML", "XAML", "FXD" "XUL", "SVG", "KXML" ... e.t.c. A fatal trend. Programmers today, expecialy those working in JAVA or C# ... have to bother much more about bringing data "in form", than to do something really productive.

* Standards: Important is the standardisation of data (data exchange standards", not so much the toolkit or the programming language, you use. See Java: Groovy, Jython, JRuby or Microsoft .NET language park.

* Animated GUI's, Touch: With the upcoming of Apples "touch technology" (concepts from stanford university) a new trend has come ... animated, moving selectors, menus with - OpenGL ES hardware acceleration on 2W power consuption processors (TI OMAP3 , 4).

* The end of SQL-92 databases: There is a clear trend towards OODBMS and persistence.

* Cloud computing: In former times called "UNIX terminals" now replace "FAT Clients".

* WEB OS coming up: Palm PRE, Google OS, all based on JAVASCRIPT.

* Desktop applications go to portable computers. (Mailclient on desktops in huge enterprises will one day be replaced by new software technologies on portables)

* Computer games go Shockwave/Flash. JAVA, SILVERCLOUD, WPF, SQUEAK Plugin laying far behind.

* Software/commuications standards and technologies go into cars: AutoSAR standard soon will replace proprietary technologies of car manufacurers.

One trend, perhaps the most important trend is still unbroken:

* Each computer professional will only recommend or suggest that technology that keeps himself employed and busy for long, long time.

Who has invented those trends? Still APPLE, IBM, SUN, ORACLE, MICROSOFT.

Today one standard is still vacant. Portables OS and GUI. Who will make the run? Perhaps Microsoft, perhaps GOOGLE, perhaps Nokia/Siemens, perhaps Samsung ... who knows? Hundreds of millions of dollars are being inwasted in new GUI prototypes ...
IMHO one standard will fall in a few years: INTEL Processors. Asia with its billion of people need "high performance, low power consuption" standards. ARM and MIPS, IBM, FreeScale, TI will make the run. And: Linux will make the run as basic platform for all new technologies mentioned above.

But: I still can't figure out, where exactly Pharo or Smalltalk as software technology could occupy a vacant market niche or even set standards.

regards, Guido Stepken

Well for one thing it's hard to collect funds when you visit both the squeak and pharo home pages
and there is no "donation" link.   If there is no way to make a donation, then don't expect one.

The esug site is almost there, until you tap the "But, you you can make a donation to support ESUG." and get
Error: "/seaside/pier/supportesug" not found. No doubt someone should fix that, also a link that isn't as hard to find would be welcome.

I do have a donate page on http://smalltalkconsulting.com/squeak.html but no-one in 2009 bother to press it.
Thankfully some folks did email me to say yes they bought one of my squeak based apps on purpose as a way of providing support,
so to them, thank you.

To be fair ESUG has provided funding to folks (like myself) to rewrite or provide some critical infrastructure, but unless there is more effort
 put into fund collecting, then ...  

On 2009-12-13, at 2:55 PM, Marcus Denker wrote:

> Sometimes I think there is something I fundamentally don't understand...
>
>
> Marcus

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> I'm the first one in the list. Who else?

Even if I'm not involved in Smalltalk those days I would be in.


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Me too.



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We should fix that :)

On Dec 14, 2009, at 6:48 AM, John M McIntosh wrote:

> Well for one thing it's hard to collect funds when you visit both the squeak and pharo home pages
> and there is no "donation" link.   If there is no way to make a donation, then don't expect one.
>
> The esug site is almost there, until you tap the "But, you you can make a donation to support ESUG." and get
> Error: "/seaside/pier/supportesug" not found. No doubt someone should fix that, also a link that isn't as hard to find would be welcome.


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> For Squeak/Etoys/Scratch it's quite clear. Teaching programming to children.
> IMHO, there is no better software to teach childen. Alan Kay as community
> organizer and figurehead leading a crowd of followers. There is a community
> of people, driving that stuff slowly, but steadily forward.

I will not comment that one :)

> In germany its HPI investing lots into building up knowledge in
> Smalltalk/Squeak/EToys. Money comes from SAP founder. Very idealistic man.

I do not think so. Money does not come for that. Now that students develop
etoy projects  

> The situation of Pharo reminds me a bit of Dolphin Smalltalk: Where's the
> customer who urgently needs such a product?
>
> There are a lot of free competitors around: Smalltalk/X, GNU, Little, Vista
> ...


Little, Vista really :)
I let them to you :)

> It's not easy to explain the differences of concepts behind those
> smalltalks. But it's much harder to explain, why we need to invest more time
> and sink more money into a (commercially) "sinking boat" of technology.

don't worry we will succeed.
...

> But: I still can't figure out, where exactly Pharo or Smalltalk as software
> technology could occupy a vacant market niche or even set standards.


Of course if you compare Pharo with system that got multimillion dollars.
Now our goal is to make sure that people will be able to make business
with an open-source smalltalk and that we will start to rethink the infrastructure.

Now we were talking about 120 Euros per year!!!!
The basic shareware software I buy for my machine cost 60 Euros.

Stef






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IMHO Bounty Hunting is better model. It saves spirit of non commercial
development, but allows some stimulations and complex features (which
is not a part of roadmap) development.

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 13:52, Stéphane Ducasse
<[hidden email]> wrote:
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On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Guido Stepken <[hidden email]> wrote:
> I could make out a few "trends" in software technology since some time:
>
> * Parallel computing. (Smalltalk rather has a structure of a human brain, no
> chance to parallelize, wrong algorithms behind)

Untrue. Smalltalk, the language, makes it really easy to write
concurrent programs. Unfortunately, there's no Smalltalk VM which can
run well on multiple CPU cores. GemStone/S comes close.

Gulik.

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On 15 Dec 2009, at 08:32, Michael van der Gulik wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Guido Stepken <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> I could make out a few "trends" in software technology since some time:
>>
>> * Parallel computing. (Smalltalk rather has a structure of a human brain, no
>> chance to parallelize, wrong algorithms behind)
>
> Untrue. Smalltalk, the language, makes it really easy to write
> concurrent programs. Unfortunately, there's no Smalltalk VM which can
> run well on multiple CPU cores. GemStone/S comes close.
Well, the debugging tools do ****, ehm, well: "printf" is the most reliable helper. At least in the context of Squeak/Pharo.

Anyway, there is a VM, not quite stable and ready for production use, but for me, it works:
See: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1640134.1640149

Now it even runs on boring x86 chips, tested here with 16 hyperthreads.

Well, and if there are people ask David for it, IBM Research might want to fully open source it...

Best
Stefan


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Phone: +32 2 629 3956
Fax:   +32 2 629 3525


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