2009/6/28 Bernhard Pieber bernhard@pieber.com:
I agree with what Juan and K. K. Subramaniam wrote. Squeak needs a goal, a statement what it is supposed to be. One thing I miss from the old days is the kitchen sink image. Neither Etoys nor Pharo have the goal for delivering such an image. So that could be a good raison d'être: Show what can be done with Squeak, and show what is done with Squeak. Something inclusive, a place for showing off all the cool, interesting, blue plane stuff, which is possible with such a dynamic environment. This attracted me to Squeak in the first place, and I think it still has the potential to attract newcomers. I miss Connectors, MathMorphs, Alice, Games, ThingLab, Genie, Nebraska and all the other cool things that were once. But maybe it's just me. ;-)
I'd like to ask, where those people who care maintaining these bits , making them available for new squeak versions, improving them, adding new features and so on? If there none of them, then how do you think, why is that? And why people, who does not interested in this stuff at first place, must do anything to maintain it? Do they have nothing else to do?
That's why i am totally agree with Pharo vision on that: they don't want unmaintained stuff in Pharo, that's why one of the Pharo milestones is to clean the Morphic from Etoys and other unmaintained stuff. And i share their approach on that: if you want your stuff to be able to work with base image, then provide a script/package/loader , or whatever is needed to load it into basic image and maintain it. If your package can't be loaded w/o errors, then it is your problems, not the problems of people who developed core image.
Isn't that made clear to anyone these days: a days of bloated images which includes everything and where everything is working is passed. Because there are people who need to deploy stuff on server (to run Seaside or Wiki, or other services), and if you put bloated stuff there, and try to scale, the people around will start asking, why it consumes so much resources?
Thanks for your attention. Cheers, Bernhard
Am 28.06.2009 um 20:02 schrieb K. K. Subramaniam:
What Squeak lacks is a clear enunciation of its value proposition. The opening para of squeak.org is too general and leaves gaps. A short para that crisply answers all the following questions:
what is it primarily? - a programming environment, runtime, a kernel, a research workbench for virtual machines? who is the intended audience? researchers? industrial programmers? advanced programmers? what is the primary purpose? prototyping? demos? test beds? what are its nearest competitive technology? Java? Flash? What is uniquely different (and much better) from these?
Such a para will serve to set expectations early and clearly.
Am 28.06.2009 um 16:08 schrieb Juan Vuletich:
Squeak doesn't have a set of objectives and an agenda that is meaningful for developers. And it hasn't had it for a long time. Pharo is new. But Tweak, Croquet and Etoys forked looong time ago. Now you also have Pharo and Cuis. Most developers are contributing to forks, and we only send our stuff for Squeak as a side-effect.
Am 28.06.2009 um 14:57 schrieb Juan Vuletich:
Squeak needs an agenda badly. Something along the lines of the old "Where is Squeak headed" from Dan. Without that, Squeak can't advance in any direction at all. People choosing a Smalltalk for their projects can not know what to expect. Forks can not know if they are needed or not.
Most forks have clearly defined objectives. Etoys, Croquet, Cuis do have them. The objectives for Pharo are broader, and less defined. But Pharo guys know where they are going, and they have some developer time and organization to advance.
Squeak has nothing of this.
The Squeak community needs to define objectives and an agenda for Squeak, or decide that we don't have them, and that the Squeak branch will not be developed further.