Smalltalk Reloaded Was:Re: Removing Etoys (was Re: A process proposal for 3.10)

Laurence Rozier laurence.rozier at gmail.com
Wed Oct 25 18:33:42 UTC 2006


All,

E-toys has a long history memorialized in places like Google and as has been
mentioned elsewhere e-toys will continue to have an association with Squeak
because of OLPC. People will be introduced to Squeak in part because of
e-toys. All other considerations aside, if e-toys is unloaded from the main
distribution and cannot be easily reloaded by a new Squeaker, there will be
confusion and for many disappointment and/or some other non-positive
experience.

I changed the subject to "Smalltalk Reloaded" because like Neo in The
Matrix, many of us have been down this path before. There's a larger, older
problem looming which the Smalltalk community has not fared well with in the
past. Ron has touched on some issues about how we function together in this
community. For me, they speak to Smalltalk being "for the creative spirit in
everyone" which is what I originally bought into 25 years ago. Dave Thomas
put it well:

Smalltalk is much more than a programming language, it is a complete
environment that represents the true philosophy of open, user-driven
computing. Smalltalk provides an environment that makes programming fun for
young and old, and it shields us from the plethora of APIs and technology
our industry calls progress. It respects the disparate cultures of business
programmers, students and systems programmers. Most of all it encourages
"we" programming as opposed to "me" programming.

Travels With Smalltalk<http://www.mojowire.com/TravelsWithSmalltalk/DaveThomas-TravelsWithSmalltalk.htm>


In the early 90's, before Java Smalltalk had a thriving prosperous
community. IBM, ParcPlace and Digitalk offerings were gaining momentum in
large corporations where C++ was failing miserably in enterprise projects.
Many(most?) new major projects were choosing Smalltalk(Object-Oriented
Information Systems by David Taylor documents this). Small and independent
developers could learn from the affordable Smalltalk/V family and with the
advent of Widgets/WindowBuilder could deploy solutions with it. Books were
being written. If you were a knowledgeable Smalltalker, you could make a
good living doing it. Then lots of smart people couldn't figure out a
reasonable, mutually beneficial way forward. It really doesn't matter who
you think was "more" to blame, the vacuum that was filled by Java wasn't
created by anti-Smalltalkers, it came from the implosions within the
community.

There are interesting parallels to where Smalltalk is today, but the
difference is that given a little bit more time, Croquet, Spoon and the
Strongtalk VM will provide a powerful flexible, mutually beneficial way
forward. In the interim, we need IMO to avoid the kinds of implosions we've
seen in the past. Making an etoyless main Squeak distribution that can't
reload e-toys is an implosion. If you're feeling impatient, consider that
some of us have been at it for several decades and are still here to
encourage you - you and Smalltalk can survive a wait.

Seeking a respectful and fun way forward for everyone,

Laurence



On 10/24/06, goran at krampe.se <goran at krampe.se> wrote:
>
>
> Markus Gaelli <gaelli at emergent.de> wrote:
> > Count me in.
> > Markus
>
> Ok! So I counted 4-5 people. Two questions:
>
> 1. Would it be a real problem if you were instead forced to use the
> Squeakland image etc?


Not for knowledgeable Squeakers who follow the list and are aware of the
different distros(I wonder  what that count is). However, given

2. Are you committed in the extent that you would actually join an eToys
> team making it loadable? Juan has already shown that it can be ripped
> out - next step would be making it loadable I presume.


It seems to me that the folks proposing to remove something with so much
history and current usage.

Why not have a an eToy-less image that

regards, Göran
>
>
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