[squeak-dev] Development methodology (was: tedious programming-in-the-debugger error needs fixing)

Phil B pbpublist at gmail.com
Sun Oct 4 21:55:42 UTC 2020


Christoph,

On Thu, Oct 1, 2020 at 7:23 PM Thiede, Christoph <
Christoph.Thiede at student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de> wrote:

> Well I can tell that in my generation, mailing lists are definitively much
> more considered as obsolete and disliked.
>
This is largely a statement about fashion/trends and overlooks one massive
advantage mailing lists have over the several *generations* of web
approaches: while they are crusty (they have been since the 90's) they are
also relatively eternal.  You want to traverse the entire history of
discussions on the Squeak mailing list?  The archives are there, in a
trivial and open format, and so you can.  Just this week I looked up some
20 year old posts in squeak-dev, it's not a theoretical argument. (try
doing that with your sourceforge... err, google+... umm, slack... history)

> Everyone has a GitHub account (or if not yet, this costs you one minute
> for millions of projects) while for a mailing list, you have to fill in a
> subscription form for every new project ...
>
Here you're showing you've already fallen behind: the github trend for
discussing things is already fading and those trendier than you have
already moved on to the next thing: Slack  is where it's at!  In a year or
two it will be something else... and the treadmill keeps going but not
really going anywhere.

Now I've been saying this somewhat kidding: I'd actually love to see
something *better* replace email for discussions.  But it has to be open[1]
and adaptable to various existing technologies as well as the new ones that
come along.  So far, there has been no critical mass around anything viable
mainly because the masses (even in the tech space) keep hopping from trend
to trend.  So many old fogies say 'meh, why bother'.  It's not that we love
email so much, it's that everything that's been proposed to replace it is
worse and fleeting.

[1] github issues fail on the open front.  Unlike git which you can always
prop up your own server for, you're always one corporate decision away from
issues being broken/taken away.

> IMO email has failed in so many points where alternatives provide better
> solutions. How many "> > > > original post > > > quoted by me > > quoted by
> you > don't eat my quote characters!1", unwanted
> line breaks after
> every third word or
> so, different confusing fonts and sizes, and much more have I been
> reading in this list! Platforms have the uniform Markdown standard to get
> rid of all this mess. Also, managing subscriptions for individual threads
> is so much easier on GitHub & Co. I think could carry on for a few more
> paragraphs, but that's probably not the point. :-)
>

I don't like HTML email myself and find it a lot easier just to read the
text version.  I know... it's not nearly as pretty, but it does work and
avoids many of the formatting issues you're complaining about.


> Best,
> Christoph
> ------------------------------
>

Thanks,
Phil
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