How to improve Squeak

Kamil Kukura kamk at volny.cz
Fri Jul 16 13:38:45 UTC 2004


> Yes, yes, yes.  That's exactly what I have in the back of my head when I 
> talk about replacing the update stream with Monticello.  The problem 
> with the update stream is that we're all using, effectively, "Doug's 
> image" (there is, of course, a large process behind it; I don't mean to 
> imply that we're subject to Doug's tyrannical whims).  But it would be 
> great to be able to track, say, "Ned's image" instead.  These would 
> probably share a lot of changesets, and advance more or less in step, 
> but would likely have different criteria for which fixes and 
> enhancements went into them.  And of course really what I'd be tracking 
> is "Avi's image" (which I might as well make public - why not?), which 
> *would* be subject to my tyrannical whims, but which would probably 
> mostly just feed off of Doug/Ned/whoever else's images with some minor 
> local tweaks.

This brought a deep thoughts to me. I was always thinking about
_purpose_ of given image. If Squeak was born with intention to be
playground for education/learning, then it's understandable that it
contains a lot of "play with this" things. But now it's possible to use
Squeak to build something useful for daily life. I develop web
applications which deal with data storages. I have plan for development
of applications relying on touchscreen and thus using Morphic. I like it
resembles me a society of people working in different areas. You can
have coffee which is result of activity of people knowing how to best
gather coffee beans, of people who prepared those beans, of people who
built machine that is able to process these beans and finally bartender
who specialize on how to assembly objects such as cup, hot coffee,
sugar, spoon, etc. But as a matter of fact, at the very begining all
these people were kids playing with toys. In order to contribute to this
world, we are first up to recognize/grasp it.

So, can we determine what is desired state of "young" image, ready to go 
to real life? I've seen this tagged as "minimal". I'm trying to find 
desired state of image which could be referred as "adolescent" - knowing 
all crucial things in order to become adult in its own specialized way. 
  I can see there aspect of "manifestation" (can display in specific 
way, can recognize keyboard/mouse gestures, can respond to surrounding 
events) and "sophistication" (can access other computer via network, can 
use hardware it sees, can persist for survival). Does it make sense?

Sometimes I have relax time just browsing what's in the image. It feels 
like adventure game. For example recently I "discovered" StarSqueak as 
it floats in 3.6 full image. Now I wonder why there are methods in class 
SmartRefStream named as:

#starLogoAntColonybosfcedppplppppttwssdlgrstta0
#starLogoMorphbosfcedppplppppttwssdlgrstt0
#starLogoTreesbosfcedppplppppttwssdlgrsttdt0
#starLogoTurtlewwxywwhcpn0

Is it normal, or some kind of bug?

-- 
Kamil




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