I agree. I think Squeak is a bunch of different groups. Since Smalltalk was the prototype for the modern day personal computer platforms, Mac OS and Windows, they have similar issues. Each of them have different communities to support as well. They have their users who just want to do some word processing, e-mail, and web browsing. They have their "power users" who want to do desktop publishing, web publishing; photo and video editing, business functions, games, etc. They have a development community that writes this software. And they have the system level coders who write system utilities for these platforms. These are different from the Squeak communities, but I'm sure similar dynamics are involved. Each time the OS vendor produces a new upgrade, they recognize they need to provide compatibility and "goodies" to each of these communities in order for the platform to thrive.
---Mark
-------------- Original message -------------- From: Lex Spoon lex@cc.gatech.edu
Howard Stearns writes:
Who is Squeak for? What are the guiding principles for decisions?
There's been a lot of discussion about this lately -- as always. So I thought some folks might (or might not!) be interested in the philosophy that Squeak is defined not by technical nor procedural means, but as a social phenomenon among the people who happen to consider themselves Squeakers (or Smalltalkers).
Many years ago, Kent Pitman made this argument about Lisp, and I think he said it well: http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Lambda.html
Thanks for the link, Howard, I look forward to reading it.
I view Squeak as a common area for a lot of different groups, and thus the social aspect cannot be ignored if you want to understand Squeak. It's not a project with a single goal and a 5-year plan for getting there.
Brenda Laurel compares the situation to Renaissance Festivals, and has a great way of putting it: "Everyone there is having a good time, but everyone there is having a *different* good time."
As a quick stab, we have:
- The Squeakland project, Alan Kay's favorite branch, which uses
Squeak as a new kind of media. Squeakland tries to
- Myriad computer-science research groups who love having a free,
malleable Smalltalk as a base to experiement from.
Classroom usage for teaching how objects work.
Development. Smalltalk is very productive, and Squeak is
a good one.
- ... and maybe a part of the Hundred Dollar Laptop.
An older article I wrote tries to make the same enumeration, as well as sketch what kind of bilaws would make any sense for such a diverse group:
http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/44.html
Anyway, I'm sure I left some folks out. What do others think?
-Lex
True, but missing my point (and Lex's, I think, which is certainly not the only way to look at it). The platform-as-party view is that different platforms (or languages or projects) can be thought of simply as a group of people -- not what the people do with the platform.
Think of a political party, or the group of fans of one sports team vs another. There may be values, intentions, or practices that set one group from another, but quite often there isn't. Or maybe they're not consistent. While some folks hook up with one group or another because of values and such, many are just born into it. Maybe there was a cute girl. Or someone impressed you as really knowing what they were doing and they turned out to be a Squeaker. Sometimes the reasons that things happen is subtle. Sometimes there isn't a reason at all. [The mathematician Gregory Chaitin is considered the heir to Goedel. He is noted for proving that some things (in mathematics) are not true for a particular reason -- they just are. As a (randomly?) triple apropos example of my point, I only became acquainted with Chaitin because he uses the count of characters in Lisp source code as an inverse measure of a computation's elegance. I thought that was cool, and had some correspondence with the guy, which made me a fan. Probably more than would be warranted by the math. Cult of personality happens. Kuhn happens.]
All of which is very touchy-feely and interesting and all, but what's the value? As much as I hate the idea that people devote so much of their lives to subtle and sometimes arbitrary choices of clique, it is a fact. We can either ignore this disagreeable truth and flail, or we can try to incorporate it into our thinking.
[Make's no difference to me. I'm just watching and sharing. Your mileage may vary.]
Again, Kent's description is at http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/ Lambda.html It's pretty short, and he writes better than I do.
-H
On Oct 28, 2006, at 10:45 PM, mmille10@comcast.net wrote:
I agree. I think Squeak is a bunch of different groups. Since Smalltalk was the prototype for the modern day personal computer platforms, Mac OS and Windows, they have similar issues. Each of them have different communities to support as well. They have their users who just want to do some word processing, e-mail, and web browsing. They have their "power users" who want to do desktop publishing, web publishing; photo and video editing, business functions, games, etc. They have a development community that writes this software. And they have the system level coders who write system utilities for these platforms. These are different from the Squeak communities, but I'm sure similar dynamics are involved. Each time the OS vendor produces a new upgrade, they recognize they need to provide compatibility and "goodies" to each of these communities in order for the platform to thrive.
---Mark
-------------- Original message -------------- From: Lex Spoon lex@cc.gatech.edu
Howard Stearns writes:
Who is Squeak for? What are the guiding principles for decisions?
There's been a lot of discussion about this lately -- as
always. So I
thought some folks might (or might not!) be interested in the philosophy that Squeak is defined not by technical nor procedural means, but as a social phenomenon among the people who happen to consider themselves Squeakers (or Smalltalkers).
Many years ago, Kent Pitman made this argument about Lisp, and
I think
he said it well: http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Lambda.html
Thanks for the link, Howard, I look forward to reading it.
I view Squeak as a common area for a lot of different groups, and
thus
the social aspect cannot be ignored if you want to understand
Squeak.
It's not a project with a single goal and a 5-year plan for getting there.
Brenda Laurel compares the situation to Renaissance Festivals,
and has
a great way of putting it: "Everyone there is having a good time,
but
everyone there is having a *different* good time."
As a quick stab, we have:
- The Squeakland project, Alan Kay's favorite branch, which uses
Squeak as a new kind of media. Squeakland tries to
- Myriad computer-science research groups who love having a free,
malleable Smalltalk as a base to experiement from.
Classroom usage for teaching how objects work.
Development. Smalltalk is very productive, and Squeak is
a good one.
- ... and maybe a part of the Hundred Dollar Laptop.
An older article I wrote tries to make the same enumeration, as well as sketch what kind of bilaws would make any sense for such a
diverse
group:
http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/44.html
Anyway, I'm sure I left some folks out. What do others think?
-Lex
Howard--
Thanks for pointing out Kent's paper. There is not much I don't agree with there. It is interesting as we get older how Meta concerns such as these become more important. So it would appear that computer languages are growing, changing, and living language as much as natural languages. He also gives a good explanation of the dynamics within and between groups, and in particular this group. I don't think this is bad. I think people are drawn to languages such as Smalltalk and Lisp because they are malleable. I certainly would loose interest if Smalltalk was frozen. I personally am drawn to this group because it is exploring new concepts and ideas.
David
Howard Stearns wrote:
True, but missing my point (and Lex's, I think, which is certainly not the only way to look at it). The platform-as-party view is that different platforms (or languages or projects) can be thought of simply as a group of people -- not what the people do with the platform.
Think of a political party, or the group of fans of one sports team vs another. There may be values, intentions, or practices that set one group from another, but quite often there isn't. Or maybe they're not consistent. While some folks hook up with one group or another because of values and such, many are just born into it. Maybe there was a cute girl. Or someone impressed you as really knowing what they were doing and they turned out to be a Squeaker. Sometimes the reasons that things happen is subtle. Sometimes there isn't a reason at all. [The mathematician Gregory Chaitin is considered the heir to Goedel. He is noted for proving that some things (in mathematics) are not true for a particular reason -- they just are. As a (randomly?) triple apropos example of my point, I only became acquainted with Chaitin because he uses the count of characters in Lisp source code as an inverse measure of a computation's elegance. I thought that was cool, and had some correspondence with the guy, which made me a fan. Probably more than would be warranted by the math. Cult of personality happens. Kuhn happens.]
All of which is very touchy-feely and interesting and all, but what's the value? As much as I hate the idea that people devote so much of their lives to subtle and sometimes arbitrary choices of clique, it is a fact. We can either ignore this disagreeable truth and flail, or we can try to incorporate it into our thinking.
[Make's no difference to me. I'm just watching and sharing. Your mileage may vary.]
Again, Kent's description is at http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/ Lambda.html It's pretty short, and he writes better than I do.
-H
On Oct 28, 2006, at 10:45 PM, mmille10@comcast.net wrote:
I agree. I think Squeak is a bunch of different groups. Since Smalltalk was the prototype for the modern day personal computer platforms, Mac OS and Windows, they have similar issues. Each of them have different communities to support as well. They have their users who just want to do some word processing, e-mail, and web browsing. They have their "power users" who want to do desktop publishing, web publishing; photo and video editing, business functions, games, etc. They have a development community that writes this software. And they have the system level coders who write system utilities for these platforms. These are different from the Squeak communities, but I'm sure similar dynamics are involved. Each time the OS vendor produces a new upgrade, they recognize they need to provide compatibility and "goodies" to each of these communities in order for the platform to thrive.
---Mark
-------------- Original message -------------- From: Lex Spoon lex@cc.gatech.edu
Howard Stearns writes:
Who is Squeak for? What are the guiding principles for decisions?
There's been a lot of discussion about this lately -- as always.
So I
thought some folks might (or might not!) be interested in the philosophy that Squeak is defined not by technical nor procedural means, but as a social phenomenon among the people who happen to consider themselves Squeakers (or Smalltalkers).
Many years ago, Kent Pitman made this argument about Lisp, and I
think
he said it well: http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Lambda.html
Thanks for the link, Howard, I look forward to reading it.
I view Squeak as a common area for a lot of different groups, and
thus
the social aspect cannot be ignored if you want to understand Squeak. It's not a project with a single goal and a 5-year plan for getting there.
Brenda Laurel compares the situation to Renaissance Festivals, and
has
a great way of putting it: "Everyone there is having a good time, but everyone there is having a *different* good time."
As a quick stab, we have:
- The Squeakland project, Alan Kay's favorite branch, which uses
Squeak as a new kind of media. Squeakland tries to
- Myriad computer-science research groups who love having a free,
malleable Smalltalk as a base to experiement from.
Classroom usage for teaching how objects work.
Development. Smalltalk is very productive, and Squeak is
a good one.
- ... and maybe a part of the Hundred Dollar Laptop.
An older article I wrote tries to make the same enumeration, as well as sketch what kind of bilaws would make any sense for such a diverse group:
http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/44.html
Anyway, I'm sure I left some folks out. What do others think?
-Lex
Howard Stearns hstearns@wisc.edu writes:
All of which is very touchy-feely and interesting and all, but what's the value? As much as I hate the idea that people devote so much of their lives to subtle and sometimes arbitrary choices of clique, it is a fact. We can either ignore this disagreeable truth and flail, or we can try to incorporate it into our thinking.
One concrete implication is how we deal with the shared image, which is something we *have* to be consistent about.
-Lex
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