On 24 Jan 2010, at 06:44, Friedrich Dominicus wrote:

> Josh Gargus <josh at schwa.ca> writes:
>
>>
>>
>> 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.
> You are right, but let's as it that way:
> - how many of you do activly work in the "Kernel!"
> - how many of you do use it for application development
>
> I would be suprised to see a ratio much higher than 1:10 000 or even
> 1: 100 000 (kernel dev/application dev).
>
> As I understand Keiths posting he's mainly an application developer  
> and
> so it's clear that he does not like to re-write his code over and over
> again (for whatever good/bad technical reason).

It's worse than that.

When there are too many packages all a moving target, being written on  
too many differing kernels, also moving targets. At some point the  
task of building an application and maintaining it becomes virtually  
impossible.

Suddenly there comes a point where the only choice you have is to fork  
everything!

This is a very hard choice to make if you are not good enough, or you  
don't have the time to maintain everything.

Of course the gurus Lukas', Andreas and Stefane don't have this  
problem, so they apparently don't see a need.

> There's IMHO no better way to drive away people but to break their  
> code
> over and over again...

Amen, Amen and Amen.

>>
>> 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).
> Well so you are interested in another thing. Well so you probably do  
> not
> see the points of Keiths mails.
>
>
> Regards
> Friedrich

Josh,

So, your implementation of futures, that sounds useful. My images are  
all based upon 3.10, so would you be so kind as to package up your  
implementation in a form that I can actually use in my images. A  
change set that is load able into 3.10 would be good enough, if you  
did this then Edgar would use it too I am sure. You see, then I can  
use your API with my current code base. When the time comes to move my  
code base to 3.11, the transition will be a smooth one.

thanks in advance

Keith