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Em 28-06-2009 07:23, Göran Krampe escreveu:
<blockquote cite="mid:4A4744B4.4010500@krampe.se" type="cite">(...)<br>
Possibly true, but Smalltalk, Squeak, Etoys and even Croquet have been
around for quite some time now - and we haven't seen any real explosion
yet. Croquet was meant to "explode" but hasn't. So I am not holding my
breath for "the day Squeak gets popular" :)
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
I guess there are several issues when "explosion" (in the sense of wide
acceptance & popularity) is a target for a project. I'll enumerate
some of them that came to my mind:<br>
<ol>
<li>There must be a consensus about what the project is. Meaning:
what is squeak? The VM? The VM plus basic image? The VM plus what? Same
to croquet and pharo and cuis and...<br>
</li>
<li>At least for the core things belonging to the project, naming
conventions and style must be standard.</li>
<li>The set of features must be enough to cover the proposed
capabilities. I explain: if the proposal is to have an usable general
purpose programming environment, then the core features must include
file manipulation, network communication, interface with foreign
languages, access to system calls, access to devices, etc... And these
features must be standard. And these features must be stable. <br>
</li>
<li>There must be documentation (in written form). Documentation must
be standardized. Hopping users keep browsing code and figuring out how
it work is just not reasonable for something wanted to be widely
accepted.</li>
<li>At some point in time, "corporate support" becomes necessary.
Much of what was put in topics 1 to 4 demands intensive, "semi-skilled"
hardworking. Few people engaged in development of new ideas will stop
to write manuals or to find a damned error or to put everything "in the
standard style". Someone must be hired to do the boring tasks. Besides,
as we must have learned from Java and several other real life examples,
marketing is necessary: someone must do the press job... someone must
print "Squeak for Dummies" books... someone must create courses.
Someone must show people "how cool our stuff is". But corporate support
won't appear before items 1-5 are accomplished. At a point squeak had a
sort of corporate support from Apple and Disney. It was lost.<br>
</li>
</ol>
<blockquote cite="mid:4A4744B4.4010500@krampe.se" type="cite">(...)<br>
Take XFree86 vs XOrg for example. The history there is complicated but
the fact remains - XOrg started, added lots of "cool features" quickly
while XFree86 stood still, then when the developers started heavily
voting with their feet the distros also switched and XFree86 was dead
before it even hit the floor.
<br>
<br>
There are mainly two aspects here that tells me that the above "bad
future of XFree86" is more likely to happen than the "good future of
Open/Net/FreeBSD":
<br>
<br>
- Pharo may "sound" like it has a different agenda than Squeak.org but
IMO the large majority of Squeak.org developers share the Pharo agenda.
Thus the differentiation is not there. Most people will just pick the
one with the most momentum, and that is Pharo.
<br>
<br>
- Squeak.org is standing still. Sure, there are things being done by
some people, no doubt about that. But perception is *everything* and
from the outside it seems to be standing still. Even the squeak-dev
list is quieting down and that is a bad sign.
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
IMHO Squeak.org "stillness" is happening because a point was reached
when boring work is necessary. IMHO the board should be looking for
corporate support in order to have resources to support the "boring
work". As an example: some years ago there was momentum for the use of
squeak at schools. Some governments endorsed the idea. But things don't
go ahead if you don't have "internationalization" (meaning: basic
school students are not polyglots and most of them won't speak
English). Also poor support for UTF-8 didn't help (well looking for
UnicodeInputSupport-jlrr.1.cs lost in some discussion list is not what
I would call intuitive). Besides, there are still some really basic
issues regarding to bugs and behavioral excentricities... Some boring
work should have been done to assert these issues.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4A4744B4.4010500@krampe.se" type="cite"><br>
So although I share your basic view of cross pollinating forks being a
"Good Thing" and something we should embrace (see OLPC, Squeakland,
Croquet etc etc) such forks need to have a specific goal.
<br>
<br>
IMHO Pharo is not such a fork, Pharo is still very much "generic" as is
Squeak.org. Pharo is more like "Squeak.org going agile" or "Smalltalk,
with less talk" :). And thus it resembles XOrg much, much more than
OpenBSD.
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
Again, a key issue is that perhaps there is just not enough people to
support splitting projects. Again, IMHO that is one the issues that
complicated the life of croquet. Not to mention that much of croquet
related to 3D optimization and acceleration in cross platform
environment...<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4A4744B4.4010500@krampe.se" type="cite">(...)<br>
Oh, and a final note:
<br>
<br>
But what if Squeak.org is abandoned and everyone moves to Pharo, what
is so bad about letting that happen? It is NOT bad. But I think we
could do it in a smoother way and actually turn this into something
*positive*. The merge could be turned into a real BOOST to
Squeak/Pharo.
<br>
</blockquote>
If everybody goes to Pharo it won't necessarily be a problem. The
problem will be if key people stand in one side or the other.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4A4744B4.4010500@krampe.se" type="cite"><br>
regards, Göran
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
regards,<br>
<br>
Casimiro<br>
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