Hello all,

I just received an email from a colleague that basically said I'm doing Ruby
in Steel, not because I want to but because I have to.  It is horrible, the
debugger doesn't work and the people that wrote it don't even know that it
doesn't work.  It's amazing how much better Smalltalk is.  It's not even
funny.

I would like to remind everyone that this community has great potential.
The issues of leadership and organization are only stepping stones to a
better community.  It's difficult to see the community as a whole, but it is
worth trying to do so.  The major disagreements between extremely talented
contributors are minor compared to the entire community and the results,
which is Squeak, of past contributions and collaborations.  We are much more
then the sum of our disagreements.  

I see major movement in our community.  I do see some splintering, but more
then the splintering, I see a willingness to contribute back pieces that
will benefit Squeak.  We need to find the path past the current clean up
work *, and create a way for the community to accept and embrace this
terrific new development work that is going on around us.  

Personally I believe that we need to continue to build a strong application
community.  What we have now, a beautiful development environment and
programming language, is only half of what we could be.  I would love to see
more fully developed applications like Seaside, Croquet, Gjallar, and Magma
and ways for people to contribute application components like security,
deployment, and protocol implementations.  I do like the idea of building
and supporting a Squeak Marketplace where people with development needs
could come and pay for development work, find consultants, and get things
done.  We need more support organizations.  We should be supporting better
documentation.  We also need to spend more time on security.  

The community is still alive and well, the progress we are making is all
good, and I hope that this Squeak stepping stone leads to a place that will
continue to attract the best and inspire the leaders to continue
contributing to what is, in my opinion, the best programming concept
available.  It's not even funny how good we are.  There are a lot of
developers that I know that would love to be working in Smalltalk that are
depending on us to succeed at our quest.

Thank you Göran for your story.  It was really great!

Happy Coding!

Ron Teitelbaum
President / Principal Software Engineer 
US Medical Record Specialists 
www.USMedRec.com 

* Thank you everyone that is participating in reorganizing and cleaning up
the community, from 3.10 to the websites, news, docs and PR teams, and thank
you to the board for moving us forward and helping with funding.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: goran at krampe.se
> 
> Let me tell you a story...
> 
> I was around... 
> 
> /Göran