You say "Nobody cares.
Nobody wants to make Squeak better. The only thing the Squeak community
values is compatibility with Alan's demos, and a version of Etoys that
nobody uses.".  None of those statements are true of my efforts or, as
far as I can see, of the significant efforts of the HPI team, or of Tim
Rowledge, if Chris Muller or Levente Uzoni, and probably a lot of other
folks too.

Squeak is my day to day workhorse.  The HOI folks are improving the
environment at great velocity.  Squeak 5 is ~40% faster than Squeak 4.6.
  Neither of these things are true because no one cares.

+1

And if I may add: the feeling that "nobody cares" is a permeating one. Not many people give feedback about what they care about (me included).

In my case, I definitely have the feeling that nobody cares about anything I ever did in Squeak during about 15 years now, which to day includes: a modular Lisp/Scheme implementation, an extension for functional programming, the upgrading of the Prolog implementation, a vast system for musical composition, and a Space Invader reboot.

It's fortunate I did not do this for glory and fame :)

Even more, I still mostly feel like a complete outsider (probably because I build things on top of Squeak instead of working on the core, and possibly also because I work alone and have no position in industry or academia).

I'm so convinced nobody cares about what I do that stopped long ago sending fixes to bug I encounters: I just fix them in my code. For example, the Saucers game I did has a much faster way of handling morphs, down to modified #addMorph: logic. This could be leveraged, if someone looked at the code. But you cannot command interest.

Well, that's how it is. I have the same experience with Csound people, so I'm pretty sure there is nothing specific to Squeak in these matters. The web is a cold place.


Cheers,

Stef