What I would love to know

Dan Ingalls DanI at wdi.disney.com
Fri Aug 21 16:02:29 UTC 1998


Folks -

In private correspondence, I answered a bit more of Stephane's original question, so I'm passing that along in case it's of general interest.

Dan Shafer wrote...
>I saw your note on the Squeak list about the status, future, and mission
>of Squeak. I'm still holding off doing my piece on Smalltalk/Squeak on
>the Net. But I wonder if you can or want to comment on the question I
>suspect the original questioner was trying to get at: how "official" is
>Squeak as a project at Disney? Without divulging product plans (which I
>wouldn't expect), can you say whether, e.g., this is a sanctioned Disney
>project, a "look the other way as long as these guys do their jobs" kind
>of project, or strictly a sunkworks that the bosses don't know about?
>
>I'm more curious than anything and I would be happy to hear your
>response completely off the record or even not for publication let alone
>attribution.

Well, it's actually simple, and I think we've been pretty forthright about it all along (real openness is one of the things that continues to feel good about this project).  Alan is a Disney Fellow.  So he and his crew (of which I'm one) are charged with exploring new territory of potential importance to Disney.  You don't have to go to many of Alan's talks to know that his focus is in the area of computers and education, and this is the area we explore for Disney.

Squeak is our vehicle of choice a) because of its extraordinary malleability, b) because of our complete control over it, and c) because it has a significant following of bright people who contribute everything from valueable criticism to complete subsystems.

So Squeak is not a project as such at Disney.  We are a project;  Squeak is our vehicle.  And nobody needs to "look the other way" -- if they or we thought we could get as much done in Java, we'd be using that.  What we have accomplished in our first two years with the Mouse has continued to validate this approach both among ourselves and to our management.

Hope this helps.

	- Dan





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