hi simon

I made a ****lot**** of squeak demoes over the last 5 years and I 
always see this funny (not fun)
smile on the faces of people when I show squeak. "Oh this is chidlish, 
this is fun but come on not serious......" To the point I pay an 
extreme attention to the way I do demoes now because I do not want to 
be clown. Now I can be extremely aggresive with my audience: "yes this 
looks really pink and full of color but the VM can be modified on the 
fly you know and other stuff like that" so a demo is not only showing 
the rotation halos.

Now when I start my demo and ask "ok guys how many of you have a AMD on 
your machine, raise your hands. Ok this is developed in Smalltalk you 
do not know it but there are 400 machines in parallel controlled by VW 
and this chain does not stop, cannot stop, and work 24h a day 7 days 
per week. And you know there are building a new plant for the new 
generation and they are really happy with VW"

Saying that ezboard one of the biggest web group support in the world 
as a cluster of 120 PC serving VW or that UPS tracking system is based 
on VW, or that the American Army is using war simulator built in VW 
really helps. It would help even better if I could say ok disney is 
using squeak in all the game your kids are playing but they missed that 
opportunity.

So now if you do not understand that VW is cool and that this is the 
only important player in the field
what can I say? I'm not here to convince you but realise that the fact 
that IBM dropped Smalltalk is bad for us even if we have fun with morph 
and sound and flashy toys we build the week-end and the night. Because 
during the day a lot of squeakers do Java.

Sorry to be a bit rude but we should wake up. We are a BIG community 
not just a small Squeaking ones. The guys from VW are good they 
resisted to the worse period and they deserve respect and help when 
needed. We should make Squeak growing and growing and we can move 
faster/evolve and be different than VW. I'm the first one to criticize 
some of their choice for their namespaces.
But we have to pay attention to others and we should not get trapped in 
our nice toy because other Smalltalk exist too such as the excellent 
Smalltalk/X http://www.exept.de

We can influence them and they can influence us. VW now can use squeak 
pluging, there will be/is   a port of Seaside in VW. The PDF framework 
on Squeak comes from VW.

> Just to be contrary.. why do we need a strong an conquering VW, again 
> ? In the big picture ?
This is my answer but I think that you can just think a bit and find 
yourself all kinds of reasons.

stef