Today Nathanael's work would be split into a patch of stuff that
actually makes morphic better, general enough to hook Genie in, and an
SM package. Maybe I wouldn't accept Genie itself into the base image,
because that's not what base should be (IMO). But nothing would stop
everyone that wants it from using it, or anyone that envisions an image
in which it plays a critical role from distributing such an image, based
of the "base" image + Genie package and others.

Analogy from Hell Time - Sure, it is possible for everyone to read the
same newspapers, and maybe it will even get the story right 90% of the
time, but what the heck is wrong with having news websites, and
different points of view available, all based on the same web platform?
This way even if one of the sites gets the soccer game results wrong
once, the wall street fans won't suffer (Sometimes I get too oblique.
Does anybody understand what I'm talking about?).

Andreas, I don't dream I could rival the team that SqC was, in executing
the amazingly innovative vision I was myself overjoyed and astounded by.
I don't intend to try, that's not my vision. My own highest hope is that
the same people, and others, will be able to pursue those goals, and
others, together, on a platform that allows it.

The main reason to never again be as careless as with Modules 3.3a is
not that it was a bad call at the time. You had lots of reasons to
believe you could handle it, I agree. That team was more brilliant, you
had Squeak as a full time job, you'd had success working that way
before, it seemed like the only way to make it move forward. Only
because of a combination of bad circumstance did it become as painful as
it did. 

The main reason to not accept big chunks whole is that we now have other
options. We have  agility because of a distributed system and process of
collaboration, which us Guides see as our responsibility to move
forward. People can easily review and circulate stuff that's not
included. Despite the bumps, I think it's the best idea I've
participated in adopting in a long time. Right now it's rudimentary, I
think it can soon rival the most sophisticated out there.

The communities power, and what Squeak becomes depends on who decides to
work within that system.

As to "competing against other scripting languages" - we have a better
model (object environments), better development tools, a better
language, and better predecessors to learn from. I hope some of them
become even cooler, but Squeak seems like a pretty good horse to ride
for a while.

Daniel

Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> > <whisper>3.3a modules</whisper>.
> 
> No, say it out loudly. There are lessons to be learned here but one of them
> (which almost every single person here ignores) is that we had several
> successes with other larger portions of work which have been done outside,
> which have been done more or less by individuals (or small groups of
> people). For example, who claims that he thoroughly understands how Genie
> works besides Nathanael? I believe that the corpus of work he has done is
> actually larger than 3.3a modules and yet it works perfectly well although
> it has touched _very_ fundamental pieces of code (event handling in Morphic
> for example).
> 
> The primary issue to keep in mind when dealing with such portions of work
> is: How much do 'not-quite-finished' changes interact with the rest of the
> system? Can you just ignore it and go on without being affected? In the case
> of 3.3a modules you could not since it affected about everything in the
> system. That's not true for the multi-lingualization stuff.
> 
> You should not forget that while we had a single desaster, we had numerous
> successes. I actually tend to think that one of the reasons why I was all
> for integration of the 3.3a modules system was how smoothly everything went
> up to that point. So while being cautios is certainly a good thing, you
> should also keep in mind that there are several good examples where it
> worked quite nicely.
> 
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas