[Squeakfoundation]Brainstormin'

[Cees de Groot]

Maarten Maartensz <maartens@xs4all.nl> said:
>What IS the purpose of the Squeak Foundation maillist?
>
Discuss the  Squeak Foundation. Duh. The Squeak Foundation, like - say - the
Apache Foundation or maybe the Open Office Foundation (IIRC - that now has
StarOffice under its wings), should be the "official" organization
representing Squeak (development, some products, whatever). This list is there
to discuss how the SqF should work, behave, look, feel, whatever.

>Remark A: Get Squeak into regular university-courses!

Yup. It's a-happening (Georgia), but only slowly. 

>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).
>
I care a lot for out-of-the-average opinions, and I think an unusually large
proportion of the peole involved with Squeak do :-). 

Did you add a link to your site to the Squeak Swiki
(http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak). It's an effective way to get more people
to your site, because the Swiki is regularly visited and indexed by the search
engines.

>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).
>
I agree that teaching Java in a University (opposed to, say, the 'higher
professional technical schools' - HTS, HIO - we have in the Netherlands) is a
waste of time. But then, no-one is interested in academic knowledge anymore,
it's all about being able to write 'Drs' (Master) in front of your name for a
faster career launch in business...

But I do think that if you were to show MatMorphs to some selected people,
you'd stand a good chance of arousing their interest ;-)

>Remark B: Put some really good general documentation together, maintain it
>and update it regularly!
>
Point taken. Squeak has been lacking in the area of 'first user experience'.
On the other hand, everything is moving so fast that the books that have been
published are outdated 1.5 seconds after they go to the printer. The solution
is probably to have the documentation in the image, but in a format that
people can print out if they care to (a lot of them do).

>Remark C: "Internet communities" are mostly would-be: Get some real people
>together!
>
Agreed. I have had the best results by a combination of live meetings and then
using the Internet to continue from there. However, meeting face-to-face is
expensive (we could organize a "Dutch Squeak User's Group" meeting with the
snap of the finger, but still traveling expenses in such a small country could
be too high for some poor student - or do they still get free public
transpor?. Imagine a "German Squeak User's Group" meeting...), and a virtual
community is better than no community at all. We'll have to make-do with it
for a majority of the work...

-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg@cdegroot.com>
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