Marcus Denker wrote on Thu, 1 Sep 2005 01:05:22 +0200
> Am 01.09.2005 um 00:12 schrieb Jecel Assumpcao Jr:
> > In short: the Self world lacked its Andreas and Ian which was the main
> > factor why Self and Squeak followed different paths.
> >
> But if you then look at the development of Tweak/Croquet
> and the latest discussions on the vm-list, it seems they learned their
> lesson and now are using a much more closed (hostile?)
> form of development...

My impression is the opposite. From the very start Squeak has been about
rumors, followed by neat demos, with public releases only happening much
later. Both Tweak and Croquet started out following this tradition and
then became much more open last year.
 
> So something clearly did not went the right way with Squeak from their
> perspective.

The first major part of Squeak that was developed in a relatively public
way was the 3.3 modules and that led to a lot of anger and people
leaving our community. While I don't think there was any relation at
all, I can understand it if some people hesitate to do things this way
again.

My impression is that most of the core Squeakers like the open source
way but aren't fanatics about it. Only John Maloney has spoken out
against it and feels Scratch is better as a closed product.

> One thing that the Traits discussion again has shown that it is very  
> hard to innovate in Squeak. There is a huge hostility against doing new
> things, even if the alternative is complete standstill.

Things have always been this way. I have told this story several times,
but perhaps some people still haven't heard it. Back in 1998 I had to
make a serious choice in my project: either go with Squeak or develop my
own technology (with the goal of making it more Squeak compatible over
the years). My own technology would be based on Self so I would have to
buy a Sun machine (without a monitor!) for US$5000 as a development
system. If I adopted Squeak instead I could get the most high end PC
possible (to compensate for Squeak's lower performance) and would still
have money left over for other investments. And to me a strong community
is far more important than technology (see Linux vs BSD). So I poked
around to see what people's reaction would be if I tried to get the
simplifications I felt were needed into the core of Squeak. My
impression was that a vocal (and possibly large - it is hard to tell)
part of the community would reject my changes and I would end up with a
fork, all alone with a few people cheering on from the sidelines. We
will never know if I was right, of course. My decision was that if I
couldn't have the community anyway, then I might as well not compromise
on the technology.

Meanwhile, other people have been following other paths. Some are very
conservative while others tried new things. I think there is very good
and allows the community to accept things as they demonstrate their
value rather than having to bet on them beforehand. Once the
demonstrations are available, however, rejecting them without trying
doesn't make sense.

-- Jecel