Craig, I appreciate your unpleasant situation - so many important ideas waiting to be realized and nobody willing to pay your living expenses. (I'm extremely fortunate, I get my pension and nobody asks me how I spend my time). So, as I have said before. SPOON is too promising to be stopped.
More comments inline below.
On 12.07.2007 22:36, Craig Latta wrote:
Hi--
Trygve writes:
The idea of "burn the disk packs" was a fundamental mistake; it doesn't take into account that the value of a release image is minuscule compared to the value added by user/programmers. The idea of a personal computer cannot be reconciled with the idea of throwing everything away every few years. What about my address book, my diary, the useful program I wrote two years ago, the program I'm working on now. (My programs are part of my personal data)
Well, I wasn't asking anyone to throw anything away. I was asking
for planning. Continuity is actually very important to me. Indeed, if it weren't, I wouldn't have taken the tactic of changing Squeak into what I want; I would have made something completely new. I'm also putting a lot of work into paths from current Squeak to Spoon (e.g., adapting my VM and remote browsing changes to Squeak 3.9).
We agree on this point. I'm afraid I was riding a hobby horse here.
I am afraid you expect too much from the community.
It seems so.
May be the community expects too much from you, too. When I tried to start SPOON a the end of May, I followed your instructions to "view the current _installed modules", but got an error. When I reported it, you answered "Great, you got as far as trying that! :) Those things don't actually work in that release, stay tuned for the next release." I may be naive, but I did not expect you to invite me to spend my time on things that just cannot work.
I am working on my own pet project(s). Like everyone else, I am trying to avoid committing /error 33: Predicating one research effort upon the success of another. (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/E/error-33.html)
Ah, but I think we take that too far and commit error 34 (insisting
upon small incremental changes *at all times*) and error 35 (being unwilling to imagine a way to achieve larger changes in the future). I think these are much worse than error 33, and as an exquisite case in point I present the very origin of that term, Xerox PARC. :)
I know error 33 came from PARC; I was there. But you misunderstand it. It leaves you free to reinvent the world, but warns me about prematurely building on your results. I do not insist on small incremental changes. That is precisely why I hope for a usable SPOON, an environment for new and fundamental changes that can co-exist with the old.
Still, I do want to try SPOON. But I got wary when I followed the installation directions and immediately crashed. Perhaps the project hasn't got as far as I expected.
It is indeed alpha software currently, as marked. Still, I hadn't
thought that would keep people from considering possibilities.
You first have to give me something to consider... :-)
Cheers --Trygve