Some questions about Spoon

[stéphane ducasse]

On 9 août 06, at 23:51, Craig Latta wrote:

>
> Hi Stef--
>
>> I'm surprised not to see development discussion on this mailing-list
>> except craig reports. Do you use another way of communicating?
>
> 	We communicate by direct email, telephone, IM, and the Squeak IRC
> channel, whichever is most convenient and effective at the moment.

Ok so this means that nobody beside you guys can follow. So clearly  
this is not
really an invitation to others. But this is your right. But I cannot  
learn anything from
your discussions. too bad and I cannot judge if I want to invest time.

>> Then how do you share code and enh do you have a repository?
>
> 	That's one of the things we're building. :)  At the moment, I use
> entire object memories. So far I haven't made my personal object  
> memory
> available with every snapshot, because it has things in it for other
> projects, and I'd prefer not to share them with the world yet. This is
> annoying, of course, and one of the strong motivations I have for  
> making
> Smalltalk modular. (I am thinking of just making my snapshots  
> available
> all the time anyway, though.)
>
> 	Also, we're working on fairly distinct (and large) tasks. Brenda  
> Larcom
> is working on a version of Flow (Spoon's initial networking framework)
> which is backward-compatible with earlier versions of Squeak.

Do you mean that you can load that it is not compatible with latest  
version?


> Matt Hamrick is designing security measures for Spoon. John Dougan is
> interested in making the virtual machine smaller.

Sounds cool. Do you imply cleaner version?

> Simon Michael, Byron
> Ellis, Duncan Mak, and Ken Causey have helped test the object memory
> releases (this is how we found problems with CPU usage in 1a12, for
> example).

I was thinking that it would be good that from time to time you have  
a look
at what we did in 3.9 and before: for example (the unsuccessful  
cleaning of Smalltalk)
because we could then discuss what would be the solutions. But also  
pragmas
and others, new compiler......
I have some doubts that people will want to redo that on top of spoon.

> 	(If any of the above people are no longer working on those tasks, or
> have more to add, please do chime in. The above is my current
> understanding.)
>
> 	Anyway, so far the active tasks have been very large, with relatively
> infrequent releases. I know this goes against the grain of a typical
> open-source project, but it's also part of the nature of a large
> bootstrapping effort.

This basically does not show activity nor transparency so you lose and
lurkers too.

> I encourage anyone who is interested in participating to ask "what can
> I do?" rather than wait for a lot of talk. We're spending our effort
> making progress, so that we'll have something meaningful to say  
> when we
> do talk. :)

Your implications is idiot but this is your problem not mine.
I think that forums are the best way to convince other people to  
participate.
Now if I would not care about spoon I would have just look at the  
mailing-list and
thought that it was a single project where one guy is working and  
that we do not
know where he is going or if we adhere to the goals and resulting  
designs.
But sure I'm talking so I stop.

> 	The most helpful thing a newcomer to Spoon can do right now is  
> download
> the most recent release[1], play with it, ask questions about how it
> works, and suggest improvements in the design (here on the mailing  
> list :).

We were discussing with marcus about your idea of removing names from  
classes and our intuition
is that class have a name. the fact that the implementation may not  
require a name is a different issue.
what is sad is that I did not see discussions around these ideas. But  
again I'm talking.

Stef