On Jul 6, 2007, at 2:38 PM, Blake wrote:


>> I think this is missing the point of my metaphor a bit, though, which
>> was that regardless of what the guy with the shovel wants, what I  
>> need
>> in that situation is a cab.  It's hard to pay much attention to the
>> subway construction when you're so focused on making the next plane,
>> which I think a lot of us are.
>>
>
> Fair 'nuff. I'd only add that there are lots of us standing on the  
> curb, and the situations are different for all of us. And my point  
> was, I don't think there'll be any shortage of people willing to  
> help build the subway, even as we're using the bus or Pavel's  
> shuttle* to get there now.
>
> And with that, I think I've beaten the metaphor to death.
>

I think you're still missing the point of the metaphor. Pavel is  
driving the cab.

To continue with the "speaking plainly" theme, I'll make it all a bit  
more concrete. I'm working with Avi on Dabble DB. The image we use is  
a shrunken version of Squeak 3.7. The shrinking code is based, at  
least in part, on Pavel's work. It's not as fancy as Spoon, nor is it  
even as good as Pavel's most recent work, since that doesn't work in  
Squeak 3.7. But right now, today, it gives us an image with a  
reasonably small number unneeded objects, and given that we have tens  
of thousands of them in production, that's important.

This thread began with Pavel's request for information about the  
licencing status of the the methods that are in his smallest image.  
Craig replied to that post here:

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-July/ 
118271.html

Note in particular these paragraphs:


> I'm still puzzled as to why you feel the need to duplicate the
> Spoon work (and then use false superlatives to describe the result).
> What's going on here?
>


> I'm mostly a technocrat: I want to put my effort into the
> technology I think is most effective. Do you have a similar  
> mindset? Is
> there something about Spoon that you think is lacking? Are we dealing
> with technical issues, or political ones, or something else? It's not
> clear to me why, apparently, we're working at cross purposes.
>

Both Pavel and Avi have answered these questions in the same way:  
Pavel's work provides almost as much benefit as Spoon, but with much  
lower adoption risk.

Col