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