>On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 Laurence.Rozier at knowledgearchitects.net wrote:
>
>> Folks,
>>
>> I think that having a TextEdit or WordPad like editor in Squeak would
>> bring numerous benefits not only to the core Squeak programming
>> community, but to others currently under-utilizing Squeak or not using
>> it at all. It would immediately make BookMorphs an order of magnitude
>> more useable by non-programmers and scripting types. If there is ever
>> going to be a market where Squeak-based solutions have significant
>> economic value, script-oriented developers will almost certainly play a
>> major role and they will need interoperability with formatted text.
>[snip]
>
>Oy. Let me just air Ye Olde Pet Peeve: These sorts of arguments irritate
>certain of us. 
You have every right to choose to be annoyed. As a long time advocate of, participant in and contributor to the world of Smalltalk and Squeak I claim the right to express an opinion. 

>RTF support is pretty clearly neither necessary and
>especially not sufficent to the "broader success" of Squeak,
That is your view, hopefully you'll leave room for others who have different views. My view and that of many people who use computers is that transparent handling of richly formatted text should be a given. Like most people I don't really care if it's RTF, PDF or some format you or anyone else invents and is able to convince a significant portion of the world to support. The text formatting support currently in Squeak is not adequate for most people who use computers. We(you and I and others) could change that. Let's find a solution. 
> and many of
>us are reasonably not strongly motivated by the demands of "broader
>success".
I've not expressed any "demands". My experience over the past 2 decades is that the technical and/or philosophical advantages of Smalltalk are not in and of themselves sufficient to broaden its adoption. I have parents, children, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends who would use Squeak if they could. However, teachers, employers and time insist that they deliver results in a reasonable time. It's ok if that's not important to you. :-)


>
>If you'd like RTF support, and don't want to, well, do the work (and I
>empathize, I love people imporving Squeak without my assitence :)),
I'd love to do the work if I were able. Writing a minimal text editor is not something I can do by myself. I don't believe that I should be barred from discussing the subject matter on that basis. People can contribute in many ways. 

> I
>really do suggest holding off promising fame or fortune unless you intend
>to supply some of the latter. 

I don't mind a debate of ideas, but please, let's stick to what I actually said - I didn't promise fame or anything else. The fact is, there are very few people on this planet or even this list supporting themselves financially using Squeak or Smalltalk. I've had that experience and it felt very good to me. Are you against people earning a living while using Squeak? 

>It's just rather crass otherwise, IMHO.
Hopefully, you're open to taking another look at what I said. It is my view(which at least a few others agree with) that rich text editing is not a particularly strong feature of Squeak at the present time and that some improvement could be had. If you don't want to participate in this discussion fine, but does that mean you get to dictate what others discuss? I've never met you but the fact that you're in this very small community is a plus to me. I have no interest in arguing with you, hopefully, we can all find ways to benefit from having different views.

Peace,
Laurence

>
>Cheers,
>Bijan Parsia.
>
>