[Squeakfoundation]Brainstormin'

[Maarten Maartensz]

Hello,

Having signed onto this list some weeks ago because of something Dan
Ingalls wrote on the developers list, I have a general question and a few
general remarks (distilled from 6 months of learning about Squeak).

Question: 

What IS the purpose of the Squeak Foundation maillist?

Remark A: Get Squeak into regular university-courses!

I am a 51 year old mathematical philosopher with wide interests and too
little time and not enough health to spend more than a few hours a day on
Squeak, and also with VERY little taste for "socializing" by e-mail. I have
given a rather extensive part of my own site to Squeak, but this generates
little traffic, probably because (a) my own opinions and formulations
concerning most things are not safely average and (b) there are far fewer
people seriously concerned with Squeak and Smalltalk than the people
seriously concerned with Squeak and Smalltalk would like and do suggest (as
I learned over the past half year).

The ONE way to get Squeak REALLY going - it would seem to me - is to put
one's academic enthusiasms on Squeak's maillist into something academically
real and functional: 

TRY TO GET SQUEAK TO BE PART OF THE ACADEMIC CURRICULUM IN YOUR UNIVERSITY! 

After all: It IS Open Source; it IS marvellous; it IS fun; and lots of
students might learn to program in it quite fast and quite easily - IF ONLY
there is a regular curriculum, WITH good courses, good documentation,
recent books, CDs with recent versions and lots of good documentation,
examples etc.

So I would recommend that academics concerned with Squeak seriously
contemplate the question how to get Squeak into the normal university
courses, especially in top-universities, like Yale and MIT in the U.S., and
to have it included in the standard courses offered in computing, together
with GOOD, COMPLETE, UP TO DATE documentation (fit for non-hacking types,
with less than 16 hours a day available for learning to hack a flakily
documented totally different computing language rapidly developed by some
dedicated hackers who are FAR better at writing good code than writing good
documentation of it).

For by far the best way to get Squeak going for non-developers and
non-hackers is to give Squeak a place inside the universities and academic
world; to make it known, popular and teach it; and to get intelligent
people working with it - and especially intelligent people NOT specializing
in "computer science" but in some real science like physics, chemistry,
biology or mathematics.

And as long as this does not happen, Squeak is bound to remain an effort by
a few handfuls of enthusiast hacking types, that remains almost unconnected
to "the Real World of C and Java", that are taught in very many
universities (and indeed seem to me mostly a waste of time, for nearly
anyone, especially anyone not concerned with writing commercial
applications but with doing real science - but this one cannot prove
without Squeak being present in regular university courses next to C and
Java).

In short: It seems to me very unlikely to get a major new computing
language as Squeak indeed is (being Smalltalk + Morphic) going in a major
way without getting it taught in standard courses in universities. So if
there is ONE thing "the Squeak community" should try, next to developing
Squeak, it is to give it a firm footing inside the academic world and
inside ordinary courses in computing and programming. (And even if most
developers have graduated, by far the best way to get a market going for
Squeak-related matter is by having it taught in universities. It might even
get some developers an academic job!)

Remark B: Put some really good general documentation together, maintain it
and update it regularly!

Regardless of what people tend to suggest on the developers list - where
one is fondly referred to "the Swiki" and it is generally suggested
everything to learn Squeak or Smalltalk is plentifully and easily available
on the net - the fundamental problem of Squeak-as-is (from the point of
view of an intelligent, curious non-hacker, with other interests than
hacking, and not infinitely or plentifully supplied with time and energy)
is this:

There IS NO good documentation on Squeak (for non-hacking types without a
Ph.D. in computing plus 16 hours a day to spend on hacking). Period. (And I
am not going to change my mind on this after 5 months of spending a lot of
energy on what there IS, that got me somewhat disgruntled if only because
of the money and time spend on getting time and again random jottings of
random people on random aspects of random versions of mostly past Squeaks.
Those who say there IS must have rather radically different notions on what
good documentation is, and apparently tend to be severely dedicated hacking
types with a university-job in computing, having little else to do than
learning all manner of little known languages, and telling others this is o
so very easy and all documentation to do so is o so plentifully available.
Well: It's not easy and it's not available, or if it is most of it is in
fact for dedicated specialists only, and besides most of what one finds is
outdated and doesn't work in a recent Squeak.)

Remark C: "Internet communities" are mostly would-be: Get some real people
together!

Personally, I do not believe "an internet community" is a community of real
people, since real people are far more than occasional bitstreams, and the
real world tends to be made (and unmade) by actual groups of real persons
really meeting face-to-face. (Meeting a person and freely talking you can
size them up. Reading and writing e-mails usually only gives you a
bitstream format + some information, usually partial, incomplete, and biased.)

Once again, the basic way of getting Squeak going outside the developers
list is to have it taught in real universities by real people to real
people, and to develop real communities on this basis rather than as mere
bitstreams. 

Regards,

Maarten.











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Maarten Maartensz. Homepage:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/ 
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