About squeak image compatibility (3.6/7/8)

Blake blake at kingdomrpg.com
Mon Jan 9 10:35:51 UTC 2006


On Mon, 09 Jan 2006 01:53:45 -0800, Cees De Groot <cdegroot at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> On 1/9/06, Blake <blake at kingdomrpg.com> wrote:
>> Well, if it's an exercise for the reader, then what does the community
>> matter?<s>
>>
> I'll ignore your tongue being stuck firmly in your cheek (I hope) ;-).

Mostly. :-)

> This is an important thing. Andreas is right that for everything we're
> "kicking out" (note that we haven't kicked out a lot so far), we're
> locking into new stuff. And Squeak is forking. We can scream all we
> want that this is bad, but it is happening. I tend to accept facts of
> life rather than fight them, so the issue at hand is - given that
> Squeak is forking, how do we work with it?

I would say, broadly, that forking, in the sense of making incompatible  
versions, is non-optimal. It may be a fact of life and it may be necessary  
in order for people to get what they want out of Squeak. Getting results  
is always paramount--the whole reason we fiddle with these bits in the  
first place--but shouldn't Squeak strive to make it less necessary to fork  
(in the sense that I've given)?

My immediate interest in this is that I was planning to use Alice to teach  
my kids about 3D graphics. I'd hate to see it go. At the same time, I'm  
not sure I, personally, can salvage it. (And so far, Croquet does not seem  
to have gotten to the point where it can replace Alice for teaching  
children, if that indeed is one of its goals.)

But I gotta wonder: whence all this frangibility? Isn't that really the  
bugaboo of modern programming? Or is it precisely because the whole system  
is available to everyone to hack that everyone makes code dependent on  
details of implementation?




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