Revived from the dead [Re: [squeak-dev] [Cuis] Cuis]

Josh Gargus josh at schwa.ca
Sat Jan 23 18:11:36 UTC 2010


I realize that this thread is dead due to Godwin's law, but I want to revive an old branch because Keith happened not to respond to it.  See below...


On Jan 21, 2010, at 11:49 AM, Josh Gargus wrote:

> 
> On Jan 21, 2010, at 10:00 AM, keith wrote:
> 
>> The Vision
>> =========
>> The "lurkers" just want to see a new flashy image, that they might try a little project in one day.
>> 
>> The "community" want to see the board provide vision and to promote harmony both philosophically/ideologically, and with technical facilities; harmony among all squeak forks, even those who don't want to be harmonised (i.e. Pharo). The community members want to be able to publish a package (e.g. Magma) and have it be tested to work for everyone, whether they be pharo users or squeak users. The community wants to be able keep its large published, even deployed code bases up to date and bug free.
>> 
> 
> 
> The "community" doesn't want only one thing, and different people in it want different things to different degrees.  I don't dispute that what you have described above is desirable, in principle, to the vast majority of community members.  However, it is fundamentally at odds with other goals that various community members hold dear.  A balance must be struck.
> 
> Here's a very specific example.  I would like to see more integrated support for concurrent programming in the Squeak kernel.  Toward that end, I've added a trivial implementation of "promises" to the trunk (hopefully, I'll take it further relatively soon... one of the things I've done in the interim was to re-read Mark Miller's dissertation).  The current changes are intentionally non-invasive.  However, it is possible to envision widespread adoption of such programming constructs throughout the image.  Any packages that use such constructs would rely on the support in the Kernel package.  
> 
> How do you propose to support new programming paradigms that push us beyond Smalltalk-80, and yet have every package be loadable into every release of every fork?  It's fine if your answer is that this conflicts fundamentally with your vision: compatibility is king.  Just be aware that your vision is no more synonymous with the "community's" than mine or Andreas's.


Keith, can you please respond to this?  

I believe that the two visions are fundamentally at odds.  I don't think that it is a technical shortcoming of Sake/Packages, I just think that any attempt to have universal cross-fork compatibility is fundamentally doomed to either:

1) fail, or

2) "succeed", but at the cost of preventing fundamental improvements to the programming model


It seems to me that your approach is more likely to fail in the second way, but I might be missing something.  How do you propose to address this issue?  I'm trying to look at things from your point of view, but I'm afraid that this really looks like a show-stopper to me.

Cheers,
Josh


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20100123/27036645/attachment.htm


More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list