Marcus Denker wrote:
> 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.
I disagree. We did not get almost anyone saying "you should not do this 
because I depend on Squeak to be backwards compatible". I was almost 
sorry to not hear anyone ask even the really critical question: "but 
does the RB work with Traits?". And quite a few people have cheered 
Traits on.

There is at the moment nothing stopping Traits, a quite significant 
change to the Smalltalk language, from entering the Squeak base image. 
There're lots of good reasons for this - its a careful idea, lots of 
effort has been put into papers that explain it all, lots of 
implementation work over a few years... and the result is we're almost 
ready. That "almost" is all we're waiting for, as far as I'm concerned.

Coming back to the topic, I think the community around Squeak has 
created lots of opportunities for all of us.

Andreas Raab wrote:
 >  From my point of view, Tweak and Croquet follow the same form of
 > development that Squeak used to follow: A small, dedicated group of
 > people moving the project forward, making sure it is focused on a goal
 > and making sure that it gets done.
SqueakMap allows everyone to innovate in parallel, including at lower 
commitment levels.

[snip]
 > It is not acceptable to stand
 > helplessly on the sidelines when something very bad is about to happen
 > and all you can do is scream and kick (and if you do, you get flamed
 > etc). It is not acceptable if you need a fix in your system to go
 > through the endless processes to get it approved. [snip]
MC can allow us (the wider Squeak community, including Squeakland, Tweak 
and so forth) to evolve our systems without really forking (because 
stuff can be easily merged around), and without really blocking on one 
another.

 > We have always recommended that people do exactly that even back
 > in the SqC days and most of those groups who were serious took the
 > advice. Such as Interval or Exobox or StableSqueak. And now, Scratch,
 > Tweak and Croquet do the same (which goes to show that we actually
 > take our own advice of the past).
I hope that from 3.9 and on people can eat their cakes and leave them 
whole, too. Create whatever they want, take whatever they want from 
Squeak, and give back what they see fit, without there being any need to:
 > At times, when
 > it's important enough you just have to shove it down people's throats.

But we'll see.

Daniel
PS - have you all noticed that we actually have a rewrite rule editor in 
the RB now? today I changed all the occurrences of OBClassNode on: 
<something> to (<something>) asNode, inside the relevant package, in 2 
minutes flat, with no manual fiddling. It's Magic I tell you, Magic!!