On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Karl Ramberg wrote:

> I saw that page in the FAQ, but most of what is there is very weak,
> and no longer seems to be under development.  They look to be things
> that people have started, then ran out of steam.  I know how that
> goes.  And for the FAQ to use the term 'ala WindowsMaker' is a bit too
> much! ;)

Is it just me, or does it seem that a large majority of projects to add
functionality to Squeak run out of steam after they're initially
implemented? If you browse various goodie repositories, it seems that a
majority of changesets available have something like this in the comment:
"RandomGoodie 0.3, 3/5/97.  This is an alpha version of RandomGoodie,
expect an updated version soon!"

I've always chalked this up to:
1. Smalltalk is realtively easy to maintain- a fair amount of old
changesets load fine into Squeak 3.1a, and the ones that don't usually can
be patched by a somewhat competent Smalltalker.  Thus, there's no
incintive to keep new versions maintained.

2. The Squeak community is a bunch of people who like to try stuff out,
and have fun rather than producing a really stable, production-quality
product.  That is, someone may think it's interesting to put together a
remote method call system lacking features that may be required for doing
more than just playing with it.  The author then doesn't bother to add
these features because all of the funstuff has been dealt with!

I've wondered about this for sometime, and just thought I'd let it rip
this time. Perhaps I've just not spent this much time as a part of a
relatively-small language community (compared to Perl, Python, C, C++,
Java).

I'm not complaining- Squeak does what I need it to do, for the most part.
:) I'm just as much of a criminal- I've done some work on the IRC client
(plug-ins, example bots), but never bothered to release it.  Also, if it
works right, look forward to a spell checker soon!

Regards,

Aaron