Hi fellow Squeakers!

First - I haven't followed this particular thread that much so consider me
fairly uneducated in the variations and nuisances of "pipes" as proposed.

But that has never stopped me from sharing my few cents :) :

Yes, Alan Kay wants Smalltalk to evolve - but he is IMHO not considering
the practical aspects that we as ONE Smalltalk implementation among others
(crossplatform issues) must do.

I personally also think that we should drive Smalltalk forward and not be
glued to the frozen ANSI standard. And including Traits was the first such
"move" in a long time, and even though we still don't know how it plays
out I think it was a healthy sign that we did it. :)

BUT... pipe? Come on - IMHO this is not even solving a *real* problem -
just giving us some syntactic sugar - and I generally dislike sugar in
languages. I think it will just create more problems than it will ever
"solve". I mean, what problem is it actually "solving"? Removing some
parenthesis? Is it really worth throwing away compatibility for that?

If we want to move Smalltalk forward I think we have lots of other much
more *interesting* bits to chew on like new notions of dealing with
concurrency or cleaning up base libraries (those covered by the std) or
whatever.

Having said that I also think that we could start some kind of simple way
for us to experiment without having to "choose" like this. One way is to
create an official continuously maintained "patch set" called
"Smalltalk-2000" or whatever that can be loaded on top of regular Squeak.
Maintained meaning that we "port" it onto each new version of Squeak. It
can contain several of these more drastical changes to Smalltalk and work
as a test bed.

This way people can try out these additions "in real life" and
Smalltalk-2000 could even build a strong following - and eventually we
could then consider bringing it into the slightly more conservative Squeak
line.

I think we also considered a similar approach to rewriting the Collection
classes - by making a new package called NewCollections that can be
installed without conflicts.

regards, Göran