election details *PLEASE READ*

Cees de Groot cdegroot at gmail.com
Wed Feb 21 09:47:19 UTC 2007


On 2/21/07, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> Should we actively pursue changes?

[I take it you won't mind getting answers from other candidates :-)]

Yes.

The biggest weakness in Smalltalk/Squeak atm is that it doesn't scale
well. At the very least, something in the area of namespacing is
needed - this is one thing that Java got right. And personally, I
think Goran's approach should be adopted ASAP because it is minimal
while getting a long way into the direction of solving the problem at
hand.

Beyond that - modules, components, or what you want to call them. I'm
a Jini adept, and I've seen the power of having a network of
cooperating components work for you. I also like E a lot, and think
that some sandboxing system is required to scale Squeak - we must
clean up the kernel to make it fully capability-based (also something
that Java got more right than most people assume).

Also - I'm discussing this sort of stuff with a friend who's
experimenting with a homebrew language - these components should carry
around more information than just bytecode. They need to be
"multimedial" in a sense, carrying diagrams, design notes, maybe even
various partly-complete views of the source code, whatever it takes to
make components (and sets of components) understandable to "users".

As what the board's role should be here: encouragement, and actively
rallying to get things included. Also, I think that the primary focus
of financial support should be in this area.

Oh- and the dogma of backwards compatibility has done more unnecessary
damage than I can begin to tell, IMNSHO, so I'm all for
easing/releasing that restriction between major releases.



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