[squeak-dev] The future of Squeak & Pharo (was Re: [Pharo-project] [ANN] Pharo MIT license clean)

Bernhard Pieber bernhard at pieber.com
Sun Jun 28 22:31:33 UTC 2009


Am 28.06.2009 um 23:09 schrieb Igor Stasenko:
> 2009/6/28 Bernhard Pieber <bernhard at pieber.com>:
>> I agree with what Juan and K. K. Subramaniam wrote. Squeak needs a  
>> goal, a
>> statement what it is supposed to be. One thing I miss from the old  
>> days is
>> the kitchen sink image. Neither Etoys nor Pharo have the goal for  
>> delivering
>> such an image. So that could be a good raison d'être: Show what can  
>> be done
>> with Squeak, and show what is done with Squeak. Something  
>> inclusive, a place
>> for showing off all the cool, interesting, blue plane stuff, which is
>> possible with such a dynamic environment. This attracted me to  
>> Squeak in the
>> first place, and I think it still has the potential to attract  
>> newcomers.
>> I miss Connectors, MathMorphs, Alice, Games, ThingLab, Genie,  
>> Nebraska and
>> all the other cool things that were once. But maybe it's just me. ;-)
>
> I'd like to ask, where those people who care maintaining these bits ,
> making them available for new squeak versions, improving them, adding
> new features and so on?
> If there none of them, then how do you think, why is that? And why
> people, who does not interested in this stuff at first place, must do
> anything to maintain it? Do they have nothing else to do?
Maybe some of them were not interested in maintaining it further  
because someone else broke their code for no good reason from their  
point of view?

> That's why i am totally agree with Pharo vision on that: they don't
> want unmaintained stuff in Pharo, that's why one of the Pharo
> milestones is to clean the Morphic from Etoys and other unmaintained
> stuff.
Etoys is all but unmaintained. And Juan has tried to maintain Morphic  
as far as I know.

> And i share their approach on that: if you want your stuff to be able
> to work with base image, then provide a script/package/loader , or
> whatever is needed to load it into basic image and maintain it. If
> your package can't be loaded w/o errors, then it is your problems, not
> the problems of people who developed core image.
I don't agree at all that that was a wise move. I think Squeak lost a  
lot of existing and potential contributors by saying: "If you want  
your code to continue to work in Squeak, you have to constantly adapt  
to our changes." I think that is what Stéphane Rollandin was trying to  
tell us. I am convinced that the separation of the base and the full  
image and the concentration on the base instead of the full image was  
the reason why forks were inevitable. Starting refactoring was  
necessary and a very important service for the community, but it had  
to have been done in the full image! My argument is basically that of  
Wolfgang Eder from July 2006:
http://www.nabble.com/Proposal-for-a-Squeak-migration-meeting-ts4867570i120.html#a5260913
That is still a very relevant thread today, by the way.

> Isn't that made clear to anyone these days: a days of bloated images
> which includes everything and where everything is working is passed.
Obviously, it is not clear to me. ;-) Seriously, I have thought a lot  
about it and I am convinced that the kitchen sink image was Squeak's  
main attraction. The moment we lost it we started losing contributors.

> Because there are people who need to deploy stuff on server (to run
> Seaside or Wiki, or other services), and if you put bloated stuff
> there, and try to scale, the people around will start asking, why it
> consumes so much resources?
Note, that I am not saying that the kitchen sink image could or should  
not be put together from a small image and nicely modularized  
packages. What I am saying is that if you clean up only the base image  
you will never be able to put together the full image because I guess  
many of the maintainers will not bother to repair stuff others broke.  
Worse yet, they probably will not bother anymore to create more cool  
stuff.

See, I can follow your reasoning. And it sounds very convincing.  
Therefore, I am not blaming anyone for going that route. I am totally  
sure everyone had only the best intentions. Nevertheless I am totally  
convinced it was a really bad idea and it still is, because that way  
you lose contributions and contributors.

Cheers,
Bernhard
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