Hello,

Regarding the recent loong thread related to the future of Squeak and 
suggested road map, I would like to give some points of view as a newbie 
to Squeak and Smallktalk in general.
An outsider may have complete different point of view worth reading.

Mark Guzdial was wondering what may be the expectation of newcomers to 
Squeak. As a new comer, I can jump there.

Probably the expectation of new comers just depends on how is presented 
Squeak to them. To me it has alway been presented as a multimédia tools 
with advanced programming concepts. So I just expect that Squeak has 
good and stable features in that field. If I discover that such features 
just disapear or too easily become obselete I will quit and spend my 
time to learn some  other environment. I have to admit, that I was 
really worried when I read that a super-mega-inovative stuff named T**k 
will soon replace Morph. I was just spending time learning it...

As a newbie appearing to be a math teacher, I was interested by the 
quote of the www.squeak.org: 'If you are a student, parent, or teacher, 
please jump over to our newly redesigned SqueakLand.org website, and 
download some great educational projects.' However as a French speaking 
  person I was surprise to see that I18n was poorly or/and not clearly 
in place in Squeak. I later discovered that people were working on that, 
but not on maintstream, but aside and in an isolated way. Eventually 
with the help of others I volunteer to help in localisation in French 
but with the strange feeling that it was just hugly hacks (comparing to 
the way i18n and l10n is professionnaly conducted in other project of 
the free software community). So to sum up, as a newbie I fell that 
'Squeak in education'  does not make big-enought sense as long as I18n 
is not a top concern in Squeak, at least in non-english speaking countries.

As a newbie appearing to programming, I am very interested and excited 
by the programming capabilities of Squeak. When I start with a fresh 
image, I always install Shout or Montecillo alike tools because it gaves 
me more interesting functionnalities in programming. Also as a newbie I 
will explore the tools as the Refactoring Browser and Sunit test as 
these tools open interesting programming concept. (ie after all one of 
the reason I did want to look closer in Squeak).

Mark Guzdial made some other interesting remarks regarding the 
complexity in Squeak and his difficulty to understand new 
stuff/development-tools going into Squeak. I agree with him, that as a 
newbie when I look at the categories class, it looks very impressive. 
However I do not agree about hit engeneer-position. I fell that only the 
engeneers can help Squeak to evolve and to bring us new development 
functionnalities, which in turn will help producing more interesting 
user application in Squeak. I don't think that the multimedia developers 
- which I am - can do that.

There are some other point of vew or feedback I would like to share, but 
at a meta-development level or the organisational level of the Squeak 
development.

- When a new comer hit the Squeak reference page of Squeak it gets to 
http://www.squeak.org. Do we need to comment about its quality?
After a few click it will get to http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak it 
looks a bit better, much better, not because the information is well 
organised (it is a nightmare) but only because there is a lot of 
valuable information to find.

So to say the true, the first contact with Squeak through the web is not 
very good. Until now, the only professional looking web site I found was 
in German http://www.squeak.de, the one from Small-land is also quite 
nice, but the German one is much better structured. (hints: 'Provide 
guidance in the User Interface, in particular newbie need that')

- It looks like Squeak is an orphaned project. Where are the leaders? 
Where are the founding fathers? Beside demonstrating how the UI was 
invented by themseleves can they help the Squeak community to be organised?

- Only one devel. list covers the different *core* aspect of Squeak. 
Squeak is like a whole system to itself covering VM, compiler, library, 
UI, multimedia. I cannot image that the 
linux-kernel+GCC+libc+Xwindow+Gnome could have been developped with only 
one developper mailing list.
At some point it really shows that Squeak developpement is poorly 
organised in the community.

- why there isn't sub development groups (with clearly identified 
leaders) covering some of the core points of Squeak:  VM, class-core, 
i18n, GUI, multimedia, E-Toy, code cleaning, documentation, etc.
Each sub-groups will work on its own space area (mailing list, etc) 
following a roadmap defined in common, throught a Squeak foundation. An 
  additional group, the "release team", would help in coordinating 
transveral communication and in sighting the development group to follow 
the release schedule.
All these points are not new and not from me. For example the Gnome 
community is following something like that. Look at 
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/ and the link at the right

Oh, a few last words, again related to technical aspect of Squeak and 
newbie.
A simple mandatory rule to follow when adding new classes to the core of 
Squeak will be that only well documented class can get in. I can assure 
you that newbie will thanks you.

Hilaire