> From: [...] Cees de Groot
> On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 10:20:55 -0000, Peter Crowther 
> <Peter at ozzard.org>  
> wrote:
> 
> > -- another way --
> 
> Hear, hear! (mostly. There are quite a number of nits in your 
> story I'd  
> like to pick, but I'm not going to do that at this moment)

Well, quite.  You didn't expect me to spoil a one-sided email like that
by weakening my case, did you? ;-)

> BTW - I'm thinking that we could decide to "just do it".

I think Craig already has.  Like most prophets and visionaries, he has
confused a lot of folks in the process.

> it is a whole lot better than what we've got now  
> and could be done immediately, just by deciding to do it. 

And that, I would argue, is a key point.  As Craig has found, one person
'just doing' works for that person.  As we have found on this list, a
large group delegating a few people to go away and debate something then
maybe do it sometime... doesn't work either, as the frictional costs are
too high and nobody in the small group wants the results enough.

This is actually a third problem with Squeak as an OS project... It's
too big, and does too many things, none well enough to be best-of-breed.
So there's always a better tool to use for any particular problem.  Who
would rally round the new, slimmer image?  Certainly not the
Croquet/Teatime crowd.  Not the UI folks.  It wouldn't do multimedia...
Really, it's a bit difficult to know who would take it and use it.

This shouldn't stop somebody doing it, however, and publishing the
result; that way, people might pick it up and use it.  But that
'somebody' should need/want it *for themselves*, so that they'll put the
effort in.

> But by Just Doing It, we could actually attempt to tackle 
> these issues instead of constantly debating them.

Quite.

> (re breakage - I just realized that it should be possible to 
> use the RB  
> rewriting stuff with thisContext sender to actually rewrite 
> methods that  
> call obsolete stuff and send the maintainer of the package an  
> auto-generated patch. Now that'd be an elegant tool for 
> dealing with bit rot ;)).

Quick, find an academic and publish a paper :-).

		- Peter