Windows maker [Running out of steam?]

Doug Way dway at riskmetrics.com
Thu Aug 9 00:26:53 UTC 2001


"Rev. Aaron" wrote:
> 
> 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!"

As other have said, I think this happens with most open source communities, not just Squeak's.

I think it may appear to be a somewhat bigger problem in the Squeak community, partly because there's some slight disorganization as far as where goodies/applications/projects are officially archived.  Currently, the official place to register your goodie/app/project is on the All Projects page of the Swiki. (http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/allProjects)  This is all well and good, but there are some other older archives around which aren't used much, and might give the false impression that not much is happening. (such as the "goodies" and "applications" directories on the Squeak ftp site, and probably some old Swiki pages scattered about...)  (Okay, I'm probably overstating things here)

But it might also be that the ratio of [people creating goodies] to [people using other people's goodies] is much larger in the Squeak community than in some other larger communities (Perl, Java, etc.)  I'm not positive about this, though.

> 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.

True, it is easier to maintain, or I should say easier to fix when a conflict comes up.  But then shouldn't that mean that maintainers should more easily be able to keep their own software up to date? ;-)

> 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!

There's some truth to this too, I'd say.  Although I think the problem may just be that the community is still a bit too small yet for very many production-quality products to evolve.  There are a few, such as ComSwiki, but maybe there just needs to be more end-users and folks submitting patches to various apps, for production-quality to better evolve in these apps.

In that sense, I'd like to see the Squeak community get bigger to better support stuff like this.  It doesn't necessarily have to be a dominant or huge community, just bigger than it is now. :)

Others have speculated that the Stable Squeak project might help the community grow by providing a stable, modular base, with some commercial-software-oriented issues such as fonts dealt with. (as a temporary fork)  I'm hopeful that it might, although that remains to be seen, since it is not complete.

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com


> 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




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