On Wed, 8 Aug 2001 11:27:33 -0500 (Central Daylight Time), you wrote:

> 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!"

That is not just true in Squeak, its true in almost every area of
programming. Its a lot of hard work to build production quality code,
and keep it current.

For instance, look at the Squeak web browser I wrote while at
Interval. It was very current when I stopped working on in (Spring
1998), and I'm sure if someone wanted to devote a year's worth of
their spare time they could turn it into a killer web browser for
modern Squeak. But it would be a lot of hard, tedious work.

The 3D level editor I wrote for the game Descent was another personal
example. It was written in Visual Smalltalk, and it had a lot of
really cool stuff in it, including modes of viewing/editing 3D objects
that I still haven't seen in a commercial product. The amount of time
that you have to put into a project like that is enourmous, and most
people just don't realize that when they start. I know I certainly
didn't.

Like any professional software developer can attest, there's a huge
amount of work to go between a mostly-working prototype and a
polished, finished product with all the loose ends tied up. Nice
emails and pats on the back only go so far when you're working for
free.

Later,
Jon