Hello Jerry,

I have answered your mail off-list, thought a little, and give a
reconsidered version on-list, that also replies to some others (Phil
Weicher, Tansel Ersavas, Randall Schwartz, Alan Kay, Bijan Parsia).

>Thank you for this pointer, and for writing this review.  I have already
downloaded it, and I have already submitted my subscription to SqueakNews;
your strong recommendation has nudged me over threshold on this, and I
eagerly await the arrival of my CDs. >

I am glad to hear it, and it definitely will help you understand Squeak,
and it is very well done. If the other CDs are like this one you won't
regret it. Also, seeing your academic specialism: It is a good example of
how one can educate people using Squeak, and Tansel's article 12 is a
really ingenious presentation of code, coding, writing about code etc.

Also, thanks to the coordinated efforts by Tansel and Randall, everybody
can now or very soon look at the first three SqueakNews CDs, as they are
now put on line: "www.stonehenge.com/SqueakNews/" should work by now, I
hope. (As you'll notice from their sizes in MBs, this in itself is a good
reason to offer them on CD.)

I am SURE that everybody who knows anything about programming and who takes
a peep at them will see that it is excellent stuff - carefully crafted,
nicely wrapped, and very helpful for making you understand Squeak. And this
"understanding Squeak" is in fact understanding a multi-facetted jewel
that's being polished and grown in front of your eyes, and so you need
something like this - CDs full of carefully coordinated information about
it - to help you keep a grasp on it.

Next - something about the price of the CDs, and a point Bijan Parsia
raised in response to Phil Weichert.

Alan Kay very rightly wrote the price seems very reasonable. And Tansel
Ersavas showed all on the list that .... no - at the current rate of
subscriptions, everybody can rest assured Tansel will not make it soon next
to Bill Gates on the list of software billionaires.

In fact, I didn't even think of the money when I wrote my review. But if
you think about it: For the CD I reviewed, the price per article per person
is ... 75 dollarcents. For the later CD-s, I understand the price per
article is lower. The problem is that you have to invest in quite a few of
them in a lump sum. (Yes, I am not rich either.)

Well - what you have on the moment with Squeak, as far as I can see, is the
beginning of a free open source programming and communicating environment,
that can help everybody think and communicate in ways that are wholly new
in human history. It is new in many senses, even if standing on the
shoulders of Smalltalk. It is Smalltalk + Morphic + Open Source, and there
is nothing much like it.

It is not only new as a programming environment, but also as an idea of
what free software must be, and of the role this should play in society -
where it should function much like language, mathematics or music, liked,
picked up, studied and developed for the same reasons as are language,
mathematics or music, but with this difference that it is a new tool for
thought: It gives the human mind access to all sorts of ways of thinking,
being creative and making art using computing machines. 

Now one of the ways of consolidating such a programming environment is to
provide it stable niches - academically, commercially, on the net. And one
of the ways of getting the programming environment off the ground is to
develop it and document it. It seems to me that SqueakNews is one excellent
way of doing BOTH at the same time - but indeed people must buy into it,
and take a risk of (maximally) 75 dollarcent per article per person.

>However, I would respectfully disagree with you on the issue of whether
folks should post comments on your review to the list.  I believe a good
number of us who read (as many of) the submissions to the squeak-dev list
(as they can) are interested in how one learns Squeak, how one talks and
thinks about Squeak, and so forth.  Moreover, I believe that information
about all these matters is highly relevant to the work of "the developers",
which ideally we all are, even if we don't start out thinking we will be.
So I would suggest -- in fact I would *request* -- that those who have
comments or reactions to your review post them to this list so that all
have the choice of reading them if we wish.>

Well, I agree up to a point. But I also really believe the developers list
is mostly for the developers, and developers are people who really can
code, and sofar I am not. And I am only on the digest (which I also find
more pleasant than a steady trickle of mails over the day). 

Indeed it seems to me that the English used to present and explain Squeak
and Smalltalk is simply misguided and confusing. And I don't mean that in
any condescending way: It is VERY easy to misrepresent something
complicated and multi-layered and multi-levelled, especially if it is also
wholly new - and programming languages are pretty recent "tools for thought".

However, one reason to want to avoid discussing this is that programming
languages are subtle things with many aspects, sides, applications,
meanings, intellectual embeddings in people's heads and so on - and what I
am doing in my review is questioning the accepted paradigm of presenting it
and thinking about it.

This must be done, and it probably must be done by people like me, with
some grounding in logic, philosophy and psychology - but is also something
that may be divisive, confusing, spark ideological discussions etc. 

Also, it is something I myself am thinking about without settled opinions -
except that metaphorical animistic English is not the proper way to
seriously consider formal languages. (And for me programming is: dynamic
logic, in two words.)

>Certainly this list supports an incredible amount of traffic.  But that is
as much a reason in favor of as against my suggestion/request.  Everyone
who reads this list of necessity needs to develop intelligent and selective
methods for dealing with the high volume of information.  So, for example,
when I see I message header that reads something like "Re: External Libs
(was Re: libcurl?!)", I either bypass it or delete it altogether, and
anyone who thinks development concerns should be fragmented from squeaknews
and the ideas you raise (or just doesn't care about squeaknews for whatever
reason) can behave similarly in response to the message header "Re: A
Review of SqueakNews".>

True. But I really think that what Squeak needs most are rapid development
and good documentation. The rapid development must come from the people who
are much better at coding in Squeak than I am at the moment, and this is
primarily their list and their medium of communication. I like it a lot,
and it is a privilege reading very clever people doing very nice things in
a very beautiful programming language - but I am not the one to teach them
coding, and I don't want to stand in the way of rapid development.

The best thing towards developing good systematic documentation, fit for
newbies and gurus, and documenting the whole system, is something like
SqueakNews, since it is written in Squeak, and each issue is a hefty number
of MBs of carefully selected and presented information.

If this keeps being done as well as what I saw and reviewed, this may turn
into a sort of "Scientific American" of Squeaking, to adopt a analogy many
readers may know, and this surely is both a good thing and much needed, and
worth a little money, and trouble, and help. (I am not making the analogy
for US reasons - and I am Dutch - but because this is the best general
review of science I know, and very helpful to keep a rational perspective
on science.)

>Anyway, thanks again for this and for your other very interesting
contributions to this list, and you may be hearing from me under a message
header near you.

Best,
Jerry Balzano>

Well, you're welcome. It is a pleasure and a privilege to be here, and the
right sort of approach seems to me to be illustrated by the list the last
few days: Just by a little individual initiative, there suddenly is a point
and a way to check out and consolidate SqueakNews, thanks to an
international cooperation of Tansel and Randal. (See:
"www.stonehenge.com/SqueakNews/" - which I hope works, and the list the
last days.)

THAT's the way to do it. Similarly, it would be good if academics in
universities would try and see whether they can reserve some space on their
servers in their universities for Squeak and Squeak-related material. I
will try getting this done at the University of Amsterdam (with which I
have a somewhat peculiar position, being a brilliant graduate of it, and
being thrown twice out of it "because of your published opinions, in spite
of your serious illness", as wrote the Board of Directors, and being an
upcoming Ph.D. of it "real soon now"), and I hope others try it in their
academic environments: It is NOT to make money, it is NOT commercial: It is
to further science, civilization, and free computing for all. And it's
great fun.

Regards,

Maarten.





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Maarten Maartensz.
Website in Amsterdam about philosophy, logic, 
M.E. (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) and much more:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/
more than 25 MB of stimulating and original ideas.
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