Summary of "Magma notes" issues
Colin Putney
cputney at wiresong.ca
Sun Jul 11 04:05:29 UTC 2004
On Jul 10, 2004, at 7:17 PM, Ramiro Diaz Trepat wrote:
> Yes yes... It's true that you guys add a lot to Squeak.
> In spite of that, and in spite of how smart you are Avi, you seem to
> lack wisdom. I don't really know you or anybody here, but I believe
> you must be very young, and may be a bit immature, to be so arrogant
> and to show so little respect towards the work of Chris (whom I don't
> know either), but who is obviously someone very smart as well, and
> with the balls to undertake the enormous problem of object persistence
> in Squeak by himself. I don't know who do you respect here, may be
> Alan Kay, may be Dan Ingalls. I haven't done a lot of research but
> I'm sure they don't come out to people who is trying to add value to
> Squeak that way.
> Smalltalk is been around for a looong time without gaining almost any
> success in the real world, and indeed, in my humble oppinion this is
> still a gehetto that really needs to support people like Chris facing
> the important challenges that Squeak has. I am the vicepresident of a
> software company, and although I enjoy *a lot* playing with Squeak in
> my spare time, I believe it would be irresponsible to use it in almost
> every production environment I know. There's a lot of work to be
> done, and the very few that do the most important struff (you and
> Chris for instance) should really support each other (imho).
> The funny thing is that you remind me of myself when I was in my early
> twenties. Years will probably teach you that humbleness is not a
> curse.
> Cheers !
Well, it looks like this thread is just about finished. That's a shame,
because for a moment there I thought some progress might come out of
it. I didn't detect any lack of respect in Avi's posts. He spent
several hours testing Magma, with, as far as I can tell, the best of
intentions. The result? Condescending dismissals of his feedback and
admonishments not to rock the boat.
I, too, have a lot of respect for the enormous amount of vision and
effort that Chris has put into Magma. I sincerely hope that he will be
successful with it. I don't know how he defines success, of course, but
I imagine that large numbers of people using and benefiting from Magma
would be part of it.
If we, the Squeak community, want to benefit from Chris' work, it
behoves us to support him. Most of us can't afford to contribute code
or documentation directly, but feedback isn't that hard. In fact
feedback is probably the most valuable thing we can contribute to any
Squeak project.
In my own experience, feedback from the community is absolutely
crucial. The second release of Monticello, for example, was a major
improvement over the first version, largely because of community
feedback. Anytime somebody mentioned that they weren't using
Monticello, we pounced on it and hounded the poor soul until he coughed
up the reason Monticello wasn't suitable. In so doing, we discovered
quite a few issues with the system we had designed - not bugs per se -
but good reasons people weren't comfortable trusting their source code
to Monticello. The interesting thing was that it was actually a fair
amount of work to get criticism. Nobody wanted to tell us that our
assumptions were wrong or that we had made design mistakes, even when
we had.
Criticism is a wonderful thing! Why are we so afraid of it? There's
nothing disrespectful in pointing out a problem - it's an opportunity
for improvement. So, for my contribution to Squeak and Magma, I'll chip
in my criticism, hoping that it's received in the spirit that it's
intended - a sincere desire to see the project succeed.
First, Chris, you have to understand that Magma is not as stable as you
think it is. When I tried it out (a while ago), excited at the prospect
of a Squeak-native OODB, I ran into strange problems like the ones Avi
describes. Unlike Avi though, I just shrugged, said "this doesn't
work," and moved on. Your response to Avi and others who report
problems has been to deny that there is a problem, which is a signal to
potential users that you don't intend to fix it, and that reporting
bugs is pointless. I know this is probably not your intent, but it is
the subtle message you are sending when you respond to criticism.
Second, I'm a little puzzled by your non-support of concurrent sessions
in a single image. This is precisely the configuration that would make
Magma useful for web-applications. Web applications developers are
probably the single largest group of people interested using an OODB
from Squeak. They're also vast majority of those using Squeak for
production software as opposed to research. They are the core of your
target market. (Again, assuming your goal is to have people use Magma.)
Why do you ignore them?
Finally, you should know that you come across as being rather cavalier
about risks to people's data. In a business setting, the kind of data
that goes into a database is often absolutely crucial to the business.
There can be no possibility of losing it. If you appear to be less
paranoid about data loss than your users, that in its self is a reason
to avoid Magma, regardless of its technical merits.
Respectfully,
Colin
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