Two important issues...

goran.hultgren at bluefish.se goran.hultgren at bluefish.se
Sun Feb 16 13:59:40 UTC 2003


Standing on the side here...

A few of the postings from Stephane has probably
mistakenly/unintentionally sounded like "Ok, Squeakers - either you do
this and this or we will leave...". I understand Jim's reaction, but I
don't think it was intentional from Stephane.

Ok. But there is indeed one important thing to note here - and please -
these are just my personal reflections.

As one of the people committed to Squeak I would not like us to adopt
technology that will really affect Squeak to the core - if not the
principal people behind that technology is devoted to Squeak and to the
community and will "hang on even if the road gets bumpy". What am I
trying to say? Well, I would really hate the following scenario:

1. The community adopts Traits (still a long term gradual thing of
course). Nathanael is AFAIK the principal engineer behind the code.
Perhaps this stuff is so complex and to the core of Squeak that few
others can help out and/or maintain it.

2. Along the way "the guys in Bern" decide that, nah - Squeak wasn't the
proper vehicle for our research. It may be due to some choices in the
community that doesn't turn out to the liking of "the guys in Bern" - or
whatever. And "the guys in Bern" simply jumps off the ship and start
using Smalltalk-younameit instead.

And then here we are, left with a system we don't understand, with a
halfbaked new browser/parser etc. etc. That wouldn't be good. It could
all turn out similarly to 3.3alpha (even if it would be partly due to
other reasons) where we ended up with a halfbaked system we couldn't
move forward.

So... please tell me that I am paranoid and that the above will not
happen. :-)

regards, Göran



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