[Newbies] Squeak/Smalltalk - Java

[Ralph Johnson]

> I've noted a trend with two big Squeak apps, Alice and Sophie, going to Java
> for their next major release: Why is this so?

I don't think Alice was ever in Squeak.

The team that built Sophie wanted to move it forward.  However, they
received their funding from a foundation that is not very technical.
This foundation tends to hop from developer-team to developer-team.
The Sophie group was the third one they had funded, I think.  The
Sophie team thought they were going to get their contract renewed
because they had met their objectives, but the foundation seemed to
want to keep up its team-hopping custom.  I don't know why they
decided the way they did, but it is common for companies to make
decisions that seem to engineers to be misguided.  They is why Dilbert
is so popular.  It is not enough to write good software, you have to
market it and make sure there is a user base and a management team
that supports it.

-Ralph