Mike, > On 17 Dec 2016, at 22:48, Michael J. Forster <m...@sharedlogic.ca> wrote: > > On 17 December 2016 at 14:09, Sven Van Caekenberghe <s...@stfx.eu> wrote: > [...] >> >> I think I understand your point, and in some specific situations that might >> be true. But if you can only afford to pay $35 a month for your hardware, >> how low must your income be ? Are you in a commercially viable enterprise >> then ? >> >> For a couple of $1000s you can get the equivalent of 10s if not up to 100 of >> those instances. And that is still much less than office rent, let alone 1 >> employee. >> >> The challenge today is not the cost of cloud hardware, it is simply building >> and operating your application. That is assuming you can sell it enough to >> make a living from it. >> > > > Hi Sven, > > No disagreement. I should clarify that, although I'm writing these > from my old email address, I'm not talking about a software > development company these days. I am now the analyst, programmer, and > system administrator for a long time client, and software is at the > heart of what we do, but we don't make money from it directly. We have > 2.2MLOC of Smalltalk, Common Lisp, Erlang, and PostgreSQL spread over > 30 systems, 20 databases, and 160 data entry terminals.
Sounds quite familiar, real world stuff. > So, for example, while we need to sell concert tickets at an opening > peak of 10,000 seats in the first hour 10 times per year, and while we > deploy a dozen hardware-constrained gate admission nodes in a > distributed cluster that must validate up to 1000 tickets per second, > we also have some really complicated personnel scheduling and customer > reporting applications. The former really can't be done in anything > but Erlang where not just hardware but sysadmin cost is a factor. For > the latter, I wouldn't choose anything other than Pharo+Seaside--for > the same reasons you give. Yeah, such peaks are a special case indeed (having been on the buyer side end as well), I would not use Pharo in the direct path there either. > In a nutshell, we have, at times, startup/enterprise-class computing > problems and costs funded by small business revenue. > > Mike It would be interesting to hear more from your applications - please consider contributing a story to http://pharo.org/success - we need them. Thanks for this discussion. Sven
