On Sun, 22 Apr 2001, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
[snip]
> The issue of modularity, which I believe will keep an upper limit on the size 
> of the Squeak community at approximately its current size (an assumption 
> borne out by a lengthy perusal of the mailing list archives and a google 
> search for 'squeak smalltalk', which shows developers frequently drifting to 
> squeak briefly and then away from it, or refusing to maintain their software 
> and/or update it for a recent SqC `blessed' image, for these reasons),
[snip]

Well, "bourne out" is strong, since I look at the same evidence and see
steady Squeak Community growth.  Continual.

Now *of course* people drift in and away...that's, imho, the nature of the
world. And *yes*, of course, there have been nifty things which fell (at
least for a while) by the wayside. OTOH, I can point to huge chunks of
useful functionality that used to be separately loaded goodies (everything
from PWS, to the ObjectExplorer, to SUnit). Yes there have been some
frictive moments and some noticiable "failures" (e.g., I wish we'd had
block closures a year and a half ago, sockets are still touchy). I know
that made some people, for example, use WikiWorks over Swikis. Er..but
WikiWorks is a *good* thing. :)

Would Modularity make all this better....maybe. Would it make it better
"enough"...maybe. Getting events was nice, but I don't see the
reverberations have quite died down from that ;)

Finally, and this is an old saw of mine, quick growth or even large growth
isn't necessarily a happy thing. I'm *not* of the world domination
mindset. I'm happy there's things like Ruby. Or VisualWorks, or Dolphin.

Note that much of getting things into the base image is a matter of
volunteer work (and kudos to Stefan Matthias Aust for all his work (hmm,
someone else was doing this too, yes? Kudos to you!:))).

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.