[squeak-dev] Re: Squeak direction

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Sat Nov 7 18:55:29 UTC 2009


This is a very good discussion to have, but we should organize it a
little better. Juan listed several personal visions of where Squeak
should go and what these individuals are doing about it. Others have
offered criticism and/or suggestions, which I think is also valid. Igor
mentioned the board vision: relicensing and more modularity.

The board's vision will naturally be a kind of lowest common denominator
of the different directions, and so will be far less ambitious than
individual visions. The only way to improve that is to better align
everyone's particular plans for Squeak as much as possible so that the
common ground becomes larger. This thread could be a positive step in
that direction.

One thing that has greatly reduced the scope of this board's goals for
Squeak is how long the relicensing effort is taking. Given all the work
that had been done in the previous two years, I had really hoped that we
would have been finished by the end of May or so. Now I can easily see
it as a limiting factor until at least next year. This prevented us from
doing anything about "more modularity". Last year's board at least had a
roadmap where Squeak 5.0 would be based on Spoon to address this issue,
but this year we had to restrict ourselves to far more incremental
plans.

Early in Squeak history, Dan Ingalls would post a yearly "vision" email:

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2902
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/393
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/920

We could continue posting plans here and discussing them. An alternative
would be to gather them all in a wiki page to make it easier to compare
them. Besides goals, talking about how to get the resources needed to
achieve them is also interesting.

-- Jecel




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list