= Survey ======
1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?
I am working on some open source projects which are not ready for release. When they are ready I will release them. The only thing I released so far was my FasterSets package. It was pretty much ignored until Levente Uzonyi decided to rewrite it from scratch and had his version contributed to trunk. As a result my contribution to Squeak is still 0.
2. What would it take for you to contribute more?
From my point of view I am contributing. I am just not able to release
what I have done yet. Given that my opinions on matters I have posted on have generally differed from just about everybody else it will be interesting to see how my contributions are received once they are released.
3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions? I hope (not necessarily expect) that some subset of the community will take sufficient interest in the contribution to provide valuable feedback and perhaps even get involved in improving the contribution. For the latter I guess Levente Uzonyi did this in the extreme with my FasterSets package. Beware of what you wish for, your wish may be granted.
4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from other community members, according to you? I really don't know. I know some people are contributing a lot. I assume part of the issue is that there just aren't a lot of others. I know Keith Hodges used to contribute a lot to Squeak but has become alienated from this community and so releases little now. I consider this a serious loss for Squeak.
5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of contributions and the number of contributors? I don't really know. Given the small size of the Smalltalk/Squeak communities though I view all the forks with some level of regret. More forks means more innovation I know but my main thought is that I am going to have to port my contributions to each of the forks and that is a pain. Anything that can be done to reduce this pain will help.
6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the highest)
Around 4. My biggest frustration is making a posting requesting feedback and getting no feedback at all. There is a tendency of readers of my posts to jump on some point in a posting and then ignore the rest of the posting. This can be frustrating at times. I experience these problems with other communities as well.
Regards,
Ralph Boland
(Repost of the survey is available below this message)
This is most likely the last call for this survey as the number of contributions to it have drastically decreased. I have seen many on the list who haven't participated yet and I'd be glad to hear from you. Or do I have to email everyone personally? ;)))
I will compile data around May, 10th and a report will be eventually written.
Ian. -- http://mecenia.blogspot.com/
= Survey ======
1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?
2. What would it take for you to contribute more?
3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?
4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from other community members, according to you?
5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of contributions and the number of contributors?
6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the highest)
7. What is your rating based on?
8. Anything else?
On 5/1/10, Ian Trudel ian.trudel@gmail.com wrote:
(Repost of the survey is available below this message)
This is most likely the last call for this survey as the number of contributions to it have drastically decreased. I have seen many on the list who haven't participated yet and I'd be glad to hear from you. Or do I have to email everyone personally? ;)))
I will compile data around May, 10th and a report will be eventually written.
Ian.
= Survey ======
- What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?
Actually with the new trunk system with several commiters are at work it is possible to get something into the image in a much shorter time. Putting things into the inbox is easy. I'm interested in documentation and that has now become a priority. So actually no hurdles anymore.
- What would it take for you to contribute more?
The system as such is complex and there are many spots where one could contribute. Maybe a working group having a certain focus for a certain time. XP style working groups. Or "sprints". Or putting something like 'Scrum' in place.
- What are your expectations in regard to contributions?
To be of high quality. That does not mean that everybody's contribution have to be perfect before they get submitted. But other people should check it and give feedback quickly. A group of moderately talented people can accomplish a lot in case they cooperate, i.e. communicate. (In addition to the highly productive exceptional coders :-)
- What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
other community members, according to you?
I think it needs some time (1..2 years) for people to realize that now with the trunk system things are moving faster.
The other thing is that it is not easy because often you have to do 'design recovery'. There are many unwritten assumptions of concepts which are not spelled out. And some of them are competing.
- What would you improve in order to increase the number of
contributions and the number of contributors?
Stable interfaces. In Java you have interfaces which gives you a lot of work to do but libraries load fine. The borders between interface and implementation in Squeak are blurred. Method categories are their for informational purposes only. If I want a mineral from a soda-vending machine I want to know which buttons to press and I do not want to learn how to make a copy of the soda-vending machine. Of course it is nice if I can do that if I want so, but I should not be forced to go to quickly into details.
An example: Today I wanted to load the HTML parser of Todd Blanchard http://www.squeaksource.com/htmlcssparser. It did not load though it was last updated on 23 January 2009 and has 2768 downloads. So in the past it was useful but now no longer works. An HTML parser is something crucial these days.
Quality: It is not clear what Squeak delivers and what not. For a small group of developers it is difficult to maintain a whole software stack. Code breaks too often all the time.
- How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the highest)
4...10 (varies over time, depends on the things I'm working on. If I have a project where I can use Squeak the identification is high, if I do not use it the interest is low). It takes a considerable effort to mentally shift gears between Java and Smalltalk. However it is refreshing to do so from time to time.
- What is your rating based on?
just an estimate
- Anything else?
a)I think the version 4.1 is a very nice new base to build upon. For prototypes, data conversion and integrity checks exercises, Morphic experiments, presentations, Seaside programming.
b) A downside is that contrariwise to Java a lot of the libraries are weak and not well supported (often the work of a single person without the cooperation of somebody doing test and documentation). This might easily eat up the time gained because of the more productive environment. The Java IDEs are good. You write a lot more (configuration files etc), but there are lots of examples. Learning is not easy either though. But there are many libraries to choose from. When starting to work with Squeak you may easily get side-tracked to start working on the IDE rather than your app.
c) I think we should get the Pharo tests (around 9000) into Squeak.
d) Make use of the synergy with Pharo. It is good to have this fork with a focus on SWEngineering and Web development. Focus on apps which run on both while maintaining the specific focus.
e) Squeak is more general purpose and multimedia oriented. In this area it is outstanding. It is a huge success that etoys runs on 1 mio machines. And that there are 1 mio Scratch projects. I value the goal of bringing Etoys (currently based on 3.8) and Scratch together.
f) Somebody has written that Squeak has only produced 'forks' so far. I think this is actually good. It should be encouraged to create derivative work based on Squeak. This makes it possible that different groups can work independently which enhances productivity. If something worthwhile comes out of a derivative work it may be folded back into the main stream if it is not used commercially. I see the fact the MIT license permits commercial use as useful. The advantage of having derivative work is that they can have a clear focus. This has happened in the past.
g) So the focus should be - and I assume it is - to come up with a rather minimal base image (around 1500 classes, well documented with a lots of tests - 12000), a set of well supported packages (another 2000 classes) on which people can build their own things.
h) I like the RCP GUI look of Squeak 4.1. The Pharo look is more makeshift. I don't have a workspace anymore from which I can save a text file. Too many things are cut off. This is fine for web development and SW engineering analysis tasks. But for a general purpose IDE it is too narrow. But it's good to have this fork. A kind of second source.
j) I would see getting a menu system where small apps may be registered (e.g. calculator, notepad, small text processor, scrapbook, graphical import viewer, games, learning software, simulations). The same thing applies to a good Preferences system. Going for <method tags> seems to be straightforward to get it quickly done.
k) Updated and well tested XML and HTML parsers are a real need for me. Something like JDOM is there but a bit shaky. Not enough tests.
i) As a whole it is a worthwhile endeavor. Thanks to everybody who has made 4.1 possible. This is a big step forward.
On May 1, 2010, at 3:39 AM, Ian Trudel wrote:
(Repost of the survey is available below this message)
This is most likely the last call for this survey as the number of contributions to it have drastically decreased. I have seen many on the list who haven't participated yet and I'd be glad to hear from you. Or do I have to email everyone personally? ;)))
I will compile data around May, 10th and a report will be eventually written.
Ian.
= Survey ======
- What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?
Free time, and more interest in building things on top of Squeak than going through Mantis and clearing out existing bugs.
- What would it take for you to contribute more?
The current process is fine for me.
- What are your expectations in regard to contributions?
Compared to other open-source projects, I think that Squeak contributions should have more of a focus on simplicity (vs. fancy code), and on documentation. This is because of the broad scope of Squeak. People who aren't experts in a particular domain or Squeak subsystem may wander into unfamiliar code. In a typical C-based open-source project, people don't just accidentally find themselves hacking the source-code of a new project. Also, once they commit to contributing to a particular project, the narrower scope of most projects mean that there is less to become familiar with.
In other words, one of Squeak's greatest strengths is easy access to the code of the entire system, and the advantage we derive from this depends on how easy the code is to understand and modify; we can make things easier by emphasizing simplicity and documentation.
- What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
other community members, according to you?
I haven't seen any evidence that our contribution level is low compared to other open-source projects, relative to our community size.
- What would you improve in order to increase the number of
contributions and the number of contributors?
Improve documentation so that more people who glance at Squeak decide to stick around.
- How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the highest)
9
- What is your rating based on?
On my feeling of social identification with the Squeak community :-)
Not sure what else to say...
- Anything else?
Nope.
Cheers, Josh
Hi all,
I will compile data collected from this survey and make an announcement whenever the report is available. Thank you to every participant. It was fantastic to get your opinion and an enriching experience!
Ian.
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org