Proposal for TWO official releases

Maarten Maartensz maartens at xs4all.nl
Thu Apr 18 10:00:37 UTC 2002


Hello,

Summarizing the drift of some recent mails I'd propose the following to
both Squeak.org and the Squakfoundation:

- To maintain TWO releases as a standard policy:
    A. Developers' release 
    B. Learning & Teaching release

where (A) is what we have at present, is intended for knowledgeable
Squeakers, and is short of documentation, and (B)  comes with a LOT of
documentation written inside Squeak as Active Essays and is explicitly
targetted at Newbies, University courses, and learning to program. (After
all, Squeak provides better facilities for its own documentation than  any
other language +  environment I know.)

Part of (B) would be a generally cleaned-up (refactored, debugged) image,
that also includes Class Comments (written in clear English, please WITHOUT
prose like "I am (a piece of code that) ... " and WITH plenty examples that
can be run from the Comments. (Indeed, if this proposal (B) gets going it
might take the form of several images, like several volumes of a book.)

A good start for (B) would be to have a look at the issues of Squeak News,
and one important consideration is that the contents of (B) should be not
only be relatively bug-free, stable and well-commented, but also should be
written in clear English and be explicitly addressed at people with little
or no programming experience, while giving them a "hands on" introduction
to computing with Squeak in the form of Active Essays, that show and
illustrate the code they explain.

To achieve (B) will need some coordinated effort, and seems to me to be a
worthy target for the SqueakFoundation as a first important project. Also,
to be succesfull it needs to be at least somewhat decently written and to
presuppose little or no inital knowledge of Smalltalk or programming. Good
starts where to look for relevant material, ideas and approaches are the
issues Squeak News and projects on Bob Arnings' Superswiki.

Finally (somewhat) in the present context: I agree with Lex Spoon's recent
remark to the effect that "open source" is a more comprehensive term than
the OpenSource.org admits, and that Squeak IS patently open source in
coming with its source code. I think it unwise to restrict the meaning of
"open source" to what gets the blessing of the OpenSource.org: The basic
principle of open source applications, after all, is that one gets to see
and manipulate all the code of the application and not whether
OpenSource.org or Richard Stallmann are willing to endorse it as open
source in THEIR preferred senses.

Regards,

Maarten.


------------------------------------------
Maarten Maartensz. Homepage:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/ 
------------------------------------------




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list