Am 09.12.2004 um 23:04 schrieb Mark Guzdial:

>
> A strong software engineering infrastructure is great, but not if it 
> comes at a cost to the media and playful aspects of Squeak.
>
>

I completely agree with you on this. That is why me made it clear (may 
be not enough)  that this is just the part
of squeak 3.9 that we will do. This does not imply that we don't like 
to see other things, or that this would be "the vision"
for Squeak. We would love to be able to do our stuff in the normal 
Squeak image, as we think that this will help everybody.
But if we just make life harder for others,  we will gladly step aside.

E.g. I have the impression that the whole harvesting that was done for 
3.6/3.7/3.8/3.9 did more harm than good for both
squeakland and croquet. Of course nobody involved in these projects was 
doing any harvesting, so after some thinking I
came to the conclusion that this should have been much more obvious to 
me far more earlier.

Another aspect of this: If nobody does anything in a certain direction 
it shouldn't be surprising that nothing happens... especially
if even all those things that are done by others are ignored. We have 
seen eToy related enhancements sent to the squeak-dev
list, but there was no reaction. This is a way of steering a community 
in a certain direction...

It's just that we are not multimedia researcher eToy teachers or 
computer graphics people. Sorry for that. We love all that, too,
but professionaly, we do software engineering and programming 
languages. I am a big fan of the Dynabook vision. For me,
the Dynabook should be powerfull enough to be the starting point of 
it's own successor. And this surely means that it allows
you to easily learn about and change it's own meta model. One of *the* 
most important aspects of the Dynabook is that is it
not only for kids. Only in building something comprehensive enough that 
even a researcher will use it we will mean that we
take the kids really serious.

As for Wonderland: I have multiple times sent eMail to the persons who 
should be interested in having a
working Balloon3D to make them aware that we have a problem.

Only recently I got some reaction, and I'm sure there will be a version 
of Balloon3D in 3.8 with all known fixes.

     Marcus