Tom wrote:
> I was relating my experiences in the hope that they would be useful
> for whoever puts together the "official" distribution to take into
> consideration for default settings; they involve no significant programming
> or new development and are really just policy decisions and tradeoffs.
> I'm sorry if such suggestions are not appropriate for the list and
> will, of course, stop posting anything like that if they bother anybody.
> 
> Thomas.

Tom-

I very much liked your suggestions and thought them quite appropriate.
It is by informed discussion of possibilities that the community as a
whole comes to realize what is worth implementing. Also, one person may
not always be in the best position to both generate important
requirements and generate good implementations.

Personally, I think without a frank assessment of the difficulties
Squeak has, the great promise Squeak also has will never be fully
realized.  This is especially in relation to people's initial
expectations from previous successes working with other systems, such as
say being used to a high degree of modularity in C or Python or Lisp.
When we made our garden simulator (under the GPL), we went to a lot of
trouble to find out what people's impressions were in the first sixty
seconds. (We may not have succeeded in making that experience as free
flowing as we liked, but that's another story.) 

Unfortunately, lists tend to be self-selecting. Many people come to this
list, voice such comments once or twice, and then drift off. Often those
comments are along the lines of, why can't I easily use Squeak out of
the box for shipping a stable application like I can with many other
common platforms? Personally, I have come to feel that modularity is at
the core of this problem, because with a more modular approach it would
be easier for the community to make such a distribution available and
give it a minimal level of support. 

Even the Economist which has recently noticed "open source"
  http://www.economist.com/surveys/displayStory.cfm?story_id=568269
writes:
  "To be successful, open-source software must also be designed in a
modular way so that groups of programmers can work independently on
different components. Most of the work on Linux, for example, is done
not by a large horde of hackers all working on the same code, but by
small groups of a dozen or so developers each of which concentrates on
one small part of the program." A monolithic kitchen-sink main
distribution package approach does not support that very well.

I have worked with several other systems before and after discovering
Squeak but I still keep coming back to Squeak because of the vision of a
cross-platform system that is reasonably self-contained and
self-describing, and yet open and extensible. I think Squeak has many
excellent architectural features, such being written in itself and
having a very elegant approach to making it easy to port. Few other
systems can meet Dan's boast (for a fully shrunk system) of at around
one MB being effectively a source code compression system with a
development environment thrown in for free (and cross-platform no less).
Too bad the image has bloated a bit since the good old days of 1996 (a
bit like me since I got married.)

I hope you too keep on Squeakin!

-Paul Fernhout
Kurtz-Fernhout Software 
=========================================================
Developers of custom software and educational simulations
Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com