How to improve Squeak

goran.krampe at bluefish.se goran.krampe at bluefish.se
Sun Jul 11 15:59:18 UTC 2004


Hi all!

Marcus Denker <denker at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
> Am 11.07.2004 um 15:45 schrieb David T. Lewis:
> > On Sun, Jul 11, 2004 at 11:55:56AM +0200, stéphane ducasse wrote:
[SNIP]
> > 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 experiment that was superseded by Projects.

I agree with Marcus and also, experiments are better made in a separate
package. Then they don't bother anyone and can "rot" in peace. :)

Having loose nobody-really-knows-if-it-works-half-rotten-half-finished
stuff in the base image is simply not good.

> 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.

Yes, and we shouldn't be so scared of touching these things. Either we:

1. Cut it out and put it in a package. It doesn't even have to work.
This option is nice if it isn't too tangled up.

2. Delete it. Remember, there are always old images and old VM to pick
up and look inside if someone wants to salvage it in the future.


> 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.

Well, best is if experimental stuff are in external packages. Then they
can be marked clearly as half finisihed experimental stuff etc. And
there is a maintainer, and we can see when it last worked etc.

> 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

Sidenote: There are a multitude of cool things piling up on SM that we
need to consider if we want to "bless" as being part of the official
package pool. A good example is Shout - it is so DAMN good it should be
an official package IMHO. :) And it should be in Basic.

Now, what we can do is to simply agree on this - the maintainer must be
in on it of course - and then Doug can simply put out an update loading
it. Voila.

Now, of course - 3.7 is close at hand so I propose we take a look at
these things in the beginning of 3.8. Removals and additions.

regards, Göran



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