On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 14:19, Andreas Raab wrote:
> At least it is now
> clear to me that the original vision of Squeak is really dead today. 
>
It is as dead as you make it and/or want to be. 

I may have misread your mail (I seem to be bad at that, someone
suggested just five minutes ago), but I seem to miss *why* it is bad to
see Squeak as a platform (a multimediasystem plusplus). Why is it worse
to have a platform and build the multimedia environment on top of it
(clean, modular - the direction currently taken) relative to the current
situation, one monolithic image? I can only think of one reason - a fear
that the community will not want to have the multimedia bells'n'whistles
and therefore no-one will step up, take charge of that bit, and lead the
pack. Now, if that's your fear, I don't see how splitting it up in
packages will make a difference.

Also, it seems that the 'rich personal multimedia environment' next step
at the moment is called OpenCroquet. It is so open that you cannot get
it, no-one knows how it is developed, no-one knows when a next release
will be there, so everyone is waiting for this package to be made
available, I guess, rather than reinventing wheels that are probably
already in croquet. If there's no community vision about where to take
the multimedia environment, I'd say that this is a very major reason -
everyone is waiting for croquet to show the way...

Personally, I see the modularization, platformization, .. process as a
necessary painful step in order to:
- clean up old cruft;
- make it easier, later on, to replace chunks (like the compiler, the
browser, the font support, whatever);
- make it possible to advance way faster in parallel than is ever
possible by a single monolithic image.
A benefit of this is that Squeak will become more versatile. It will
become usable as a platform - attract more users, which will add more
packages, which will or will not flow back to the multimedia 'fat'
distribution. If they flow back, it's good. If they do not flow back,
nothing is harmed. Maybe it's not a 'vision', but it surely qualifies as
a strategic move. I think the 'vision' should come from whoever will
take the responsibility for the 'fat' distribution, when this is all
implemented.


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