Em 28-06-2009 07:23, Göran Krampe escreveu:
> (...)
> Possibly true, but Smalltalk, Squeak, Etoys and even Croquet have been 
> around for quite some time now - and we haven't seen any real 
> explosion yet. Croquet was meant to "explode" but hasn't. So I am not 
> holding my breath for "the day Squeak gets popular" :)
>
I guess there are several issues when "explosion" (in the sense of wide 
acceptance & popularity) is a target for a project. I'll enumerate some 
of them that came to my mind:

   1. There must be a consensus about what the project is. Meaning: what
      is squeak? The VM? The VM plus basic image? The VM plus what? Same
      to croquet and pharo and cuis and...
   2. At least for the core things belonging to the project, naming
      conventions and style must be standard.
   3. The set of features must be enough to cover the proposed
      capabilities. I explain: if the proposal is to have an usable
      general purpose programming environment, then the core features
      must include file manipulation, network communication, interface
      with foreign languages, access to system calls, access to devices,
      etc... And these features must be standard. And these features
      must be stable.
   4. There must be documentation (in written form). Documentation must
      be standardized. Hopping users keep browsing code and figuring out
      how it work is just not reasonable for something wanted to be
      widely accepted.
   5. At some point in time, "corporate support" becomes necessary. Much
      of what was put in topics 1 to 4 demands intensive, "semi-skilled"
      hardworking. Few people engaged in development of new ideas will
      stop to write manuals or to find a damned error or to put
      everything "in the standard style". Someone must be hired to do
      the boring tasks. Besides, as we must have learned from Java and
      several other real life examples, marketing is necessary: someone
      must do the press job... someone must print "Squeak for Dummies"
      books... someone must create courses. Someone must show people
      "how cool our stuff is". But corporate support won't appear before
      items 1-5 are accomplished. At a point squeak had a sort of
      corporate support from Apple and Disney. It was lost.

> (...)
> Take XFree86 vs XOrg for example. The history there is complicated but 
> the fact remains - XOrg started, added lots of "cool features" quickly 
> while XFree86 stood still, then when the developers started heavily 
> voting with their feet the distros also switched and XFree86 was dead 
> before it even hit the floor.
>
> There are mainly two aspects here that tells me that the above "bad 
> future of XFree86" is more likely to happen than the "good future of 
> Open/Net/FreeBSD":
>
> - Pharo may "sound" like it has a different agenda than Squeak.org but 
> IMO the large majority of Squeak.org developers share the Pharo 
> agenda. Thus the differentiation is not there. Most people will just 
> pick the one with the most momentum, and that is Pharo.
>
> - Squeak.org is standing still. Sure, there are things being done by 
> some people, no doubt about that. But perception is *everything* and 
> from the outside it seems to be standing still. Even the squeak-dev 
> list is quieting down and that is a bad sign.
>
IMHO Squeak.org "stillness" is happening because a point was reached 
when boring work is necessary. IMHO the board should be looking for 
corporate support in order to have resources to support the "boring 
work". As an example: some years ago there was momentum for the use of 
squeak at schools. Some governments endorsed the idea. But things don't 
go ahead if you don't have "internationalization" (meaning: basic school 
students are not polyglots and most of them won't speak English). Also 
poor support for UTF-8 didn't help (well looking for 
UnicodeInputSupport-jlrr.1.cs lost in some discussion list is not what I 
would call intuitive). Besides, there are still some really basic issues 
regarding to bugs and behavioral excentricities... Some boring work 
should have been done to assert these issues.
>
> So although I share your basic view of cross pollinating forks being a 
> "Good Thing" and something we should embrace (see OLPC, Squeakland, 
> Croquet etc etc) such forks need to have a specific goal.
>
> IMHO Pharo is not such a fork, Pharo is still very much "generic" as 
> is Squeak.org. Pharo is more like "Squeak.org going agile" or 
> "Smalltalk, with less talk" :). And thus it resembles XOrg much, much 
> more than OpenBSD.
>
Again, a key issue is that perhaps there is just not enough people to 
support splitting projects. Again, IMHO that is one the issues that 
complicated the life of croquet. Not to mention that much of croquet 
related to 3D optimization and acceleration in cross platform environment...
> (...)
> Oh, and a final note:
>
> But what if Squeak.org is abandoned and everyone moves to Pharo, what 
> is so bad about letting that happen? It is NOT bad. But I think we 
> could do it in a smoother way and actually turn this into something 
> *positive*. The merge could be turned into a real BOOST to Squeak/Pharo.
If everybody goes to Pharo it won't necessarily be a problem. The 
problem will be if key people stand in one side or the other.
>
> regards, Göran
>
>
>
>
regards,

Casimiro
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