[squeak-dev] My own Squeak direction

Travis Kay tlk at nb.sympatico.ca
Sun Nov 15 02:46:47 UTC 2009


Andreas,

Personal dynamic media sounds excellent, media experience and malleability
is what brought me to squeak in the first place. I agree with all your
points modularity, packaging, projects and media. I use squeak for
computational fun and learning in algorithms, art, music, presentations,
information management etc.

Outside the image, I would like to see improvements in the vm; speed, 64bit
(image too), multicore and better ffi.

Travis

-----Original Message-----
From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
[mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Andreas
Raab
Sent: Saturday, November 14, 2009 3:29 PM
To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Subject: [squeak-dev] My own Squeak direction

Folks -

I feel like the recent discussion about directions left us without much 
progress in terms of where we think Squeak is headed. I actually don't 
think this is particularly hard to formulate, since as we all know, 
Squeak will be headed where we make it head to. In other words, I think 
we could come up with a pretty good idea of where Squeak will be headed 
if those people who actually contribute tell a little bit more about 
their interests and directions. So let me be the first to start here:

My long-term vision for Squeak is to bring it back to being a medium for 
personal dynamic media. I want Squeak to be a fun, educational, small, 
dynamic, media-centric environment. My current immediate directions include:

* Making the system be more modular. Adding the Morphic TextEditors, 
refactoring Project, being able to unload various packages are in line 
with that. Expect more from me in this area as time allows.

* Figuring out how to load packages, projects, etc back in. I haven't 
done much about this yet, but we desperately need better tools for 
(roughly speaking) "loading apps". Squeakmap gets some things right, 
Universes address others, both aren't very well integrated with 
Monticello, and by the end of the day the UIs for all of them suck.

* Restore the media facilities. I'd really like to see the next Squeak 
version bring back Speech, bring back Games, bring back Wonderland etc. 
All in loadable project form so that people can explore them based on a 
small initial foot print.

I'd be interested in hearing what others working on and in Squeak have 
to say about their own directions. Together it should give a pretty 
comprehensive understanding about where Squeak is headed in practice.

Cheers,
   - Andreas




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