[squeak-dev] Survey: what do you do with Squeak, what do you *want* to do?

Ben Coman btc at openinworld.com
Sat Apr 28 16:06:23 UTC 2018


On 28 April 2018 at 21:49, Sean P. DeNigris <sean at clipperadams.com> wrote:

> Nicolas Cellier wrote
> > The growing gap with Pharo is not helping and is really annoying me
>
> +1 but what can be done? The divergence is more and more fundamental e.g.
> namespaces are only available on Squeak, stateful Traits/real packages
> (RPackage) only on Pharo. For a time, I tried to sync all my projects
> between the two, but the effort is exponential, and it wasn't even clear if
> there would be users…
>

This will only get worse with Pharo moving to Bloc and presumably
Squeak dependent projects requiring Morphic for a long time.


The only (unrealistic) solution that ever came to my mind would be a
> reunification - why (besides politically and due to personalities) do cuis,
> pharo, and squeak have to be independent projects?


Personalities and politics (i.e. differing opinions/objectives/goals, not
gamesmanship)
are what drive the world.  Open source is about being able to scratch
*your* own itch.
So different projects that can have different agendas makes sense rather
than
antagnoise everyone trying to squeeze all those different agendas into one
box...



> Now that Pharo is
> bootstrapped, couldn't the energy of Cuis to have a small, clean system be
> poured into that effort? Could Squeak be a layer on top with all the cool
> stuff reimplemented. Well, it's a dream, but maybe fragmentation is just
> the
> way of the world/human beings…
>

If Squeak saw some value in having a similar bootstrap,
then leveraging Pharo's efforts would make sense and might result in
some *known* common minimal stage (e.g. pre-GUI) between distributions.
Maintenance effort could then at least be shared at that level.

Such a minimal common bootstrap would probably suit being hosted under the
OpenSmalltalk banner.

Perhaps that could even be an attractive path for Dolphin to move to
64-bit,
rather than the effort to maintain their own VM.
That would really make in impact on perceptions on Smalltalk in the outside
market.
Its a dream...  I can't guess how palatable that would be for various
parties.

cheers -ben
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20180429/cbc4a94d/attachment.html>


More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list