Little Red Hen message (sorry, it's uni-cultural)

glenn krasner at objectshare.com
Thu Apr 16 22:27:02 UTC 1998


Last Fall, I coached my son's soccer team. One of the other parents really
bugged me. He didn't like the way I was coaching his son, etc. But it
wasn't the content of his complaints that I didn't like--he was probably
correct in many cases (although given his  son was the only 7 year-old I'd
ever seen walk up and kick an opponent who was lying on the ground, I
suspect he was not totally right).

No, the thing that really bugged me the most was that the only difference
between him and me was that I was doing the work. While he just showed up
on Saturday mornings, sat back, and whined about "the result", I had spent
hours all week working and playing with the kids. Nothing, other than his
laziness, prevented him from doing what I was doing, or helping in one of
many other ways.

If he were a Smalltalk guy, then he'd probably not have joined the
Standards committee ($300 would have been too much, the travel once or
twice a year would have been to inconvenient, ...) Nor would he have given
any interesting feedback to the committee members, despite the ease at
which email can be sent. He certainly would not have sent any email during
the Public Review period, where under ANSI rules the Committee was required
to produce a written response to every question and suggestion. But he
would have complained, ridiculed, and been sad about the result.

Now since many of you are old friends, co-workers and aquantainces, I know
you wouldn't behave this way. And the rest of you, as fellow Smalltalkers,
certainly wouldn't as well. You would have taken the many opportunities
open to you to volunteer your time, thoughts, or at least email questions
in order to make the Smalltalk Standard as good as it could be, and if you
hadn't, you wouldn't complain about it after the fact.

-------------------

Having gotten that off my chest, I'd first like to apologize to anyone I
insulted with the above. Then I'd like to say that while I think the
committee has done a reasonably good job, the results could have been
better and I agree with most of the criticisms that have been expressed in
this forum. Moreover, I think that we on the committee did a particularly
poor job of communicating the review process to the community, e.g. there
were specific "cool guys" whose input we planned to solicit but didn't, and
we could have done a better job soliciting general input, e.g. by making
the boundaries of the Public Review period much more clear, by directly
addressing the Squeak email list, etc. I like to blame Shan, because he's
the Chair and my competitor, but I share the blame.

We hope to rectify some of this by coming out with a set of errata and
addenda later this year (assuming ANSI approves the current draft as a
Standard). Feedback for this is very much still welcome (email to a
committee member, or to "x3j20 at qks.com") and as I understand it, for
addenda there must be a formal Public Review period again, probably in the
Fall.

It might be worth noting here how we (or at least most of us) viewed the
Standard process. There were two key notions that drove us over the past
few years

	--that it was better to get something out sooner than something better later
	--that this would be the first of a series of Smalltalk standards.

That is, the general feeling was that we wanted to focus on getting
something out that would have the "ANSI Standard" validation, for example,
to help those who couldn't use Smalltalk because the ANSI check box was not
checked. So getting something out as quickly as we could [quick!?!? Ed.],
in particular at the expense of limiting the scope of the result, was best. 

We felt that to achieve this, we would primarily codify existing practice
(not innovate), and where there were difficult to resolve differences, err
on the side of not constraining implementors or potential implementors
(e.g., not constrain a ones-complement implementor with little-used
negative integer bit methods). Our hope was that more innovation,
codification of newer results (e.g. NameSpaces), and a wider-scoped
Standard would be done by the committe(s) that would surely follow.

I am very encouraged that the Squeak community in particular will provide
the energy and enthusiasm necessary to create the next round(s) of
Smalltalk standardization. I look forward to sitting back and complaining
about your results ;-).

glenn
Vice-Chair X3J20 (or whatever it's called now)





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