[RANT] Come on people! ;)

Stéphane Rollandin lecteur at zogotounga.net
Thu Dec 16 17:44:33 UTC 2004


goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:

> The illusion that Squeak is moving fast is also due to all the cool
> packages that are moving fast - but those are built on top of Squeak and
> aren't causing things to break.

what I call Squeak includes a lot of packages. my own application builds 
on top of a large code base.


> So... it is not that people don't have the time to "keep up" - the fact
> is rather that we are dragging along a lot of "dead code". Code that has
> *no* active maintainer. Nor very many users.

this may very well be your impression. for example to me wonderland is 
not dead code, and I use it: I developed a 3D game with it that is not 
finished yet and that I left aside for one year, being busy with 
something else. I definitely intend to finish it, but I don't know when, 
as I'm a slow programmer :)


>>we may have a real problem here 
>>if there is not some sort of centralized direction for Squeak 
>>development, or at least common goals and strong guidelines. 
> 
> I strongly disagree with the analysis. 
[...]
> What we DO need though is better structure and better tools. 

... "common goals"

Easier to
> see who is doing what and how things affect each other. Better ways of
> communicating and codeveloping. etc

... "strong guidelines"

so apart for vocabulary, where do you disagree with me ?



now let me state that the ideas I expressed in my previous post are not 
theoretical: I speak from experience. Squeak has been my main 
development environment for several years now, along with Emacs, and 
there is definitely this feeling I get with Squeak that things can 
change under my feet at any time that I do not have at all with Emacs. 
  it's very, very uncomfortable. one may wonder if the system is 
reliable: don't you think this is a worthwhile concern ?



regards,

Stef







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