On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 3:23 AM, David Corking <lists@dcorking.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 6:54 PM, Eliot Miranda wrote:

>     I've decided to run for the board.  Electioneering to follow.

Did I miss a statement that was "to follow"?

you didn't :)  The election whooshed past. But my priorities are, two top threes, the first three abstract goals, the second trio more concrete personal goals.


a) keep Squeak a fun accessible community-oriented multi-media Smalltalk (not that I contribute in any way to this).

b) underneath that superstructure increase modularity, especially in the direction of building variants by loading Monticello packages into a headless core image that is suitable for command-line scripting.

c) to better-define as, and provide better support for being, a platform.  By this I mean that a core image and its facilities, should be well-defined, well-documented, and concise.  The system should provide excellent support for command-line scripting (hence Colin Putney's new Filesystem is very important) and image building and image transformation (see d) below).  The FFI should be much improved and of high-quality.

d) provide new high-quality 64-bit and 32-bit implementations based around a new object representation and garbage collector in the VM and increase the performance of the VM by at least a factor of two (this is my personal focus for 2013).

e) increase the utility of Monticello.  While technical lead for VisualWorks I had a lot of influence on the parcel system, implemented some successes and more than my share of failures, especially w.r.t. overrides, which are a necessary evil in a rapidly-evolving system (see b) above).  In the last 5 years using Squeak I've seen just how wonderfully well Monticello works, and I'm really enjoying contributing in a small part to the efforts of people like Bert Freudenberg and Colin Putney in improving Monticello.  I'd like to see its management of overrides much improved.  And related, in-image versions are just wonderful, and enhancing the in-image version support, e.g. by ensuring that sources files can be written with full version history, is important to me.

f) see the Cog VM ported to ARM and other processors.  My GSoC student Lars Wassermann is making steady progress on this after a very impressive start last summer, and its great to see Tim Rowledge returning and working on Raspberry Pi.


Now from this you'll see some obvious gaps.  I say nothing concrete about UI or multi-media or education.  I don't spend any significant time in these areas and they're not my expertise (even though I'm a fitfully active musician).  But I love what has been done in this area and want to support others in achieving this.  For example, I'd love to see eToys above Cog.  So the above 6 points are my "platform" :).

So if you haven't voted already and the above resonates with you either consonantly or dissonantly, please VOTE!  You can put me below the "None of the below" line just as well as above it.

Have fun! David

Thank you.
-- 
best,
Eliot