Am 11.07.2004 um 15:45 schrieb David T. Lewis:

> On Sun, Jul 11, 2004 at 11:55:56AM +0200, stéphane ducasse wrote:
>>
>> the last two/three days I have been browsing a lot of code while 
>> mainly
>> playing with BookMorph.
>> And I noticed a lot of "nearly working" or "half broken" behavior. 
>> Most
>> of the time you start with a good state of mind and think that you 
>> will
>> be able to do something and suddenly you lost a day and get 
>> frustrated.
>  ...
>
>> So I would like to know how we could proceed to rescue some of the
>> squeak asset.
>
> Personally, I don't mind having some incomplete or unfinished things in
> Squeak. Many of them show good ideas and things that could be brought 
> to
> completion in the future.
>
But there's a lot of stuff that will never be completed because it was 
"officially"
abandoned. e.g. the "Squeak Server Pages" are, es much as I know, an
experiment that was superseded by Projects.

So while I'm personally very much pro experiments (and I'd like to see a
Squeak that makes real deep experimentation even simpler), the situation
we have now has realy gotten out of hand...

The Number one Principle of a System made for Experimentation: Make it 
easy
to throw stuff away. It's an interesting view of Modularity: A modular 
system not only
allows for easy composition, but should make decomposition easy, too.

For the Kernel, we have KCP (I hope to be able to actively contribute 
to that). For
Morphic, there once was MCP, but the state of Morhpic is so bad that I 
guess only
"thow it away" will work...

One question is how to make sure that something like that does not 
happen in the
future again... for the ObjectMemory, we have an automatic garbadge 
collector.

I think a Team doing experimental work would need to model a "garbage 
collector"
in their process. Either distributed among team members or one person 
responsible
for cleaning up. No nice job... but it needs to be done.

     Marcus