[squeak-dev] The future of Squeak & Pharo (was Re: [Pharo-project]
[ANN] Pharo MIT license clean)
Casimiro de Almeida Barreto
casimiro.barreto at gmail.com
Sun Jun 28 16:56:28 UTC 2009
Em 28-06-2009 07:23, Göran Krampe escreveu:
> (...)
> Possibly true, but Smalltalk, Squeak, Etoys and even Croquet have been
> around for quite some time now - and we haven't seen any real
> explosion yet. Croquet was meant to "explode" but hasn't. So I am not
> holding my breath for "the day Squeak gets popular" :)
>
I guess there are several issues when "explosion" (in the sense of wide
acceptance & popularity) is a target for a project. I'll enumerate some
of them that came to my mind:
1. There must be a consensus about what the project is. Meaning: what
is squeak? The VM? The VM plus basic image? The VM plus what? Same
to croquet and pharo and cuis and...
2. At least for the core things belonging to the project, naming
conventions and style must be standard.
3. The set of features must be enough to cover the proposed
capabilities. I explain: if the proposal is to have an usable
general purpose programming environment, then the core features
must include file manipulation, network communication, interface
with foreign languages, access to system calls, access to devices,
etc... And these features must be standard. And these features
must be stable.
4. There must be documentation (in written form). Documentation must
be standardized. Hopping users keep browsing code and figuring out
how it work is just not reasonable for something wanted to be
widely accepted.
5. At some point in time, "corporate support" becomes necessary. Much
of what was put in topics 1 to 4 demands intensive, "semi-skilled"
hardworking. Few people engaged in development of new ideas will
stop to write manuals or to find a damned error or to put
everything "in the standard style". Someone must be hired to do
the boring tasks. Besides, as we must have learned from Java and
several other real life examples, marketing is necessary: someone
must do the press job... someone must print "Squeak for Dummies"
books... someone must create courses. Someone must show people
"how cool our stuff is". But corporate support won't appear before
items 1-5 are accomplished. At a point squeak had a sort of
corporate support from Apple and Disney. It was lost.
> (...)
> Take XFree86 vs XOrg for example. The history there is complicated but
> the fact remains - XOrg started, added lots of "cool features" quickly
> while XFree86 stood still, then when the developers started heavily
> voting with their feet the distros also switched and XFree86 was dead
> before it even hit the floor.
>
> There are mainly two aspects here that tells me that the above "bad
> future of XFree86" is more likely to happen than the "good future of
> Open/Net/FreeBSD":
>
> - Pharo may "sound" like it has a different agenda than Squeak.org but
> IMO the large majority of Squeak.org developers share the Pharo
> agenda. Thus the differentiation is not there. Most people will just
> pick the one with the most momentum, and that is Pharo.
>
> - Squeak.org is standing still. Sure, there are things being done by
> some people, no doubt about that. But perception is *everything* and
> from the outside it seems to be standing still. Even the squeak-dev
> list is quieting down and that is a bad sign.
>
IMHO Squeak.org "stillness" is happening because a point was reached
when boring work is necessary. IMHO the board should be looking for
corporate support in order to have resources to support the "boring
work". As an example: some years ago there was momentum for the use of
squeak at schools. Some governments endorsed the idea. But things don't
go ahead if you don't have "internationalization" (meaning: basic school
students are not polyglots and most of them won't speak English). Also
poor support for UTF-8 didn't help (well looking for
UnicodeInputSupport-jlrr.1.cs lost in some discussion list is not what I
would call intuitive). Besides, there are still some really basic issues
regarding to bugs and behavioral excentricities... Some boring work
should have been done to assert these issues.
>
> So although I share your basic view of cross pollinating forks being a
> "Good Thing" and something we should embrace (see OLPC, Squeakland,
> Croquet etc etc) such forks need to have a specific goal.
>
> IMHO Pharo is not such a fork, Pharo is still very much "generic" as
> is Squeak.org. Pharo is more like "Squeak.org going agile" or
> "Smalltalk, with less talk" :). And thus it resembles XOrg much, much
> more than OpenBSD.
>
Again, a key issue is that perhaps there is just not enough people to
support splitting projects. Again, IMHO that is one the issues that
complicated the life of croquet. Not to mention that much of croquet
related to 3D optimization and acceleration in cross platform environment...
> (...)
> Oh, and a final note:
>
> But what if Squeak.org is abandoned and everyone moves to Pharo, what
> is so bad about letting that happen? It is NOT bad. But I think we
> could do it in a smoother way and actually turn this into something
> *positive*. The merge could be turned into a real BOOST to Squeak/Pharo.
If everybody goes to Pharo it won't necessarily be a problem. The
problem will be if key people stand in one side or the other.
>
> regards, Göran
>
>
>
>
regards,
Casimiro
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20090628/054e9ecd/attachment.htm
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|