Ken Kahn wrote:
> 
> From: Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org>
> 
> >P.S. Arguments that something bad but long established (such as MS
> >Windows conventions) should be catered to don't have a lot of force
> >for me.
> 
> I agree there is no strong need to cater to Windows UI conventions. But the
> bigger issue is to whether to build upon an existing environment or build
> one from scratch. Let me try a biological analogy. Squeak seems to be about
> finding a newly emergent island and populating it with plants and animals.
> The alternative is to find old islands that already have a rich ecology and
> strive to coexist. It is true that the old islands (like MS Windows) may
> have many warts (rats, mosquitos, posionous spiders, etc.) but they also
> have plants you can eat, animals you can domesticate, trees for shelter etc.

Interesting idea. But I seem to remember VWs extremely calm and affable
Eliot Miranda going nearly
apoplectic when it was discovered that a really tricky problem with
printer support was down to an undocumented change in a .dll. In this
case, the tree Cincom was trying to shelter in had a poisonous snake in
it!

> Making the new islands habitable is a much larger task. The resulting island
> may have a nice rationale design while colonizing old islands is a more
> chaotic distributed process that lacks the elegance of a top-down design.
> But maybe it is a richer, more adaptive environment.

To my mind, Squeak occupies a sort of middle ground. If you like, it
exists on populated islands (Windows/Mac/Linux and so on) but imports
its own microclimate and flora and fauna (that is, it doesn't tie itself
to OS font support, printer support, etc).

> 
> To push this analogy further, back when Smalltalk was being designed most
> islands were bare or nearly so. Today over 90% of the "islands" out there
> are running MS Windows. Sure, islands can be sterilized and recolonized but
> the point is that there already is an existing ecology one can join and
> build upon.

I'd dispute your figures. 90% of the webserver islands are certainly not
running Windows (that's one reason why the Internet still functions!)
nor are 90% of the servers. German figures I've seen suggest that
combined Mac and Linux use (I mean, the figures for people using Mac +
the figures using Linux, not people dual booting Mac/Linux ;-) is 20%+
on desktops and likely to grow. I say it again, the underdeveloped world
simply cannot afford to use Windows (I know substantial parts of
Liverpool which can't!).

> 
> I'm not arguing that Squeak will fail only that it is trying to do something
> very hard and risky. I hope it succeeds.

I think, given that we can't fortel the future, that the fact that
Squeak runs on a multitude of OSs is actually a safer option although I
look forward to a future when a secure, multi-tasking, Squeak as OS
evolves!

Cheers

John 

-- 
If you don't care about your data, like file systems which automagically
destroy themselves and have money to burn on 3rd party tools to keep
your
system staggering on, Microsoft (tm) have the Operating System for you.