From: Todd Blanchard tblanchard@mac.com Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers listsqueak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org To: The general-purpose Squeak developers listsqueak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: Re: election details *PLEASE READ* Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 02:14:38 -0800
The question was - What do you believe is the future of Smalltalk? My answer was from a social/market/adoption perspective - you seem to have taken it from a technical roadmap perspective.
What I meant when I said other languages seem to be approaching Smalltalk is that they adopt more ST features all the time and the prejudicial barriers are dropping. It is a fine time to win converts and grow the user base. Consider how many people no longer think garbage collection is an intolerable drain on performance. IOW, I think the future of Smalltalk is bright and that it can gain mind/ marketshare as a language. So I see a future of growing user base and rising visibility.
This is exactly how I took your statement. Though I can understand Andreas wanting to get it clarified.
Do we need to protect the pureness of Smalltalk?
No, but we do need to protect the stability. My platform - if you bothered to go read it, is about making Squeak useful for making commercial quality things. http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5922
Purity? For me personally, it depends on what is meant. If you mean sticking to the blue book 100%, then no of course not. But changes need to take us forward not backward.
Smalltalk is IMO the most productive environment there is, and that needs to be preserved. So changes like, for example, trying to make the image file oriented instead of image oriented would be very negative in my mind.
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