Whither Squeak?

Ralph Johnson johnson at cs.uiuc.edu
Fri May 19 12:20:27 UTC 2006


On 5/19/06, Cees De Groot <cdegroot at gmail.com> wrote:
> - Squeak 3.x is so far quite succesful in resisting us applying
> software engineering efforts to it. The reasons are manifold, but two
> major reasons are manpower and available tools, neither is going to
> change any time soon;

What does this mean?  Is this another way of saying "A lot of people
have been trying to modularize Squeak and we haven't gotten very far."

I'd like to see some of the concrete problems that rose during
attempts at modularization.  Why is it so hard?  For example, I have
heard that people have tried to strip Morphic out of the image, and
they have tried to strip MVC out of the image, and both have failed.
Why did it fail?

I think this is a very interesting question, and understanding why it
failed will teach us a lot about software in general.  If it is hard
to modularize code in Smalltalk, which is one of the most flexible and
visible languages in the world, imagine the problem modularizing the
Linix kernel!

Is this what you mean?

-Ralph Johnson



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