[squeak-dev] Call For *Your* Opinion

Bernhard Pieber bernhard at pieber.com
Sat Apr 24 12:35:37 UTC 2010


Am 19.04.2010 um 12:49 schrieb Ian Trudel:
> Dear Squeakizen,
> 
> I would like to call for your opinion(s) in regard to contributions. I
> am a firm believer in surveying the community in order to improve our
> sense of direction, our culture, and bonding as a community.
> 
> 1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?
1. Lack of a real use case or killer application: I don't use Squeak myself for anything, other than playing with it. I stick around because I love Smalltalk's elegance and the richness of ideas of Squeak's community.
2. Doubts about the viability of the idea of platform independent rich client development only: I can't use it to write Mac OS X applications with a native UI using all the cool Apple graphics frameworks.
3. Fragmentation of the community, too many forks, too many mailing lists, too many parallel developments
4. Personal fights on the mailing list
5. Lack of free time.

> 2. What would it take for you to contribute more?
1. Finding an application I can use Squeak for.
2. Being able to access every feature of the underlying platforms

> 3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?
Contributions should not break other contributions because that leads to a vicious circle even if that means slower progress.

> 4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
> other community members, according to you?
I can only guess. But is it really low? Maybe being even friendlier to each other would help.

> 5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
> contributions and the number of contributors?
1. Improve code quality
2. Make the community bigger by remerging with the Etoys and Croquet communities
3. More frequent releases, at least 4 per year.
4. Clarify Squeak's positioning, e.g. in relation to Pharo

> 6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
> Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
> highest)
7

> 7. What is your rating based on?
Identification with the ideal, i.e. the Dynabook vision, focus on simplicity, elegance, readability, new ideas, pink and blue plane development at the same time.

> 8. Anything else?
With the new trunk process I can contribute even if I have only 15 minutes. That's GREAT. Thanks!!!


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