[squeak-dev] PROPOSAL: UN-St (United Nations of Smalltalk)

Sean DeNigris sean at clipperadams.com
Fri Jun 5 14:45:23 UTC 2020


Thank you for your feedback on all three MLs. Here are three important clarifications:

1. My idea is actually very small and humble. Maybe “Dialect Ambassadors” would better capture the intent. Although my title was grandiose, I meant it in the “J.C.R. Licklider Intergalactic Network” sense because people tend to deliver the minimum ha ha. My actual proposal/idea is not to "reinvent XYZ", or "merge Squeak, Pharo, and Cuis into one layered system" - although I’d be overjoyed if any of that happened :) My proposal is simply to have a group of 1+ representatives from each community who believe in the importance of sticking together enough to remain calm and objective to resolve misunderstandings before they explode. Of course, there may be unintended positive consequences, like “hey, did you see the improvements we made to ABC? You may want to steal that!”

2. “We tried that when we XYZ and ABC ruined it by ____”. Yes, I’ve been a despondent bystander during many of these. That’s exactly what I’m trying to repair! Maybe the next one will succeed if we have some facilitators who are objective and impartial who can go to ABC and say, “so-and-so is worried you might be thinking about doing _____. What about XYZ isn’t working for you?” Etc, Etc. Who knows, maybe we could even get one of these stalled initiatives back on track…

3. "Why not include dialect ABC, and XYZ, too?” There’s really no reason to exclude anyone. The reason I specifically included Squeak, Pharo, and Cuis is that, as more immediate family members, we seem to experience more "sibling rivalry”. I just happened to personally know of a need in these cases (especially the first two). In fact, after some of the responses, I realized that I probably should have included Gemstone, which is clearly an important part of our shared ecosystem; again, I only left them out because I’m not aware of any problems there! 

Since there is interested, and not to distract too much from the Dev MLs, maybe we could just pick a place for interested parties to “meet”. I’m familiar with Discord (which Pharo uses), which is free but not threaded (and so can get confusing for long-running topics). Any other suggestions?

- Sean


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