Hi all,

I've developed applications in Squeak in various forms professionally
(including Croquet & Cobalt) and now I would like to give back to the
community, helping where I can. I use Squeak (and eToys) for educational
purposes and create some learning tools with it.

Like most of the community I'm persuaded by the programming and UI ideals
which Squeak embodies (and hinted at ideals and opportunities).

Curiously, each direction taken by the developers along Squeak's
development path seem to coincide with how I would envision Squeak should
progress. So, I would encourage Squeak's community to continue on it's
current trajectory: making it more modular in packages, better developer
tools, and a little more consistency in programming paradigms as needed.

Coming from an educational perspective, I do bring with me some preferences
(secondary to the above) for Squeak's progress such as:

   - Prepackaged distributions for rapid adoption for common use cases
   (since our systems should serve us and not us serve them)
   - Rapid discover of modules or components for a purpose. (Dividing a
   monolith into modules is only half the battle. We must be able to discover
   and assemble the disparate parts extremely rapidly into our solutions to be
   ideal for the intended purpose or task to accomplish.)
   - Continue supporting student constructionist education, with a gradual
   self revealing of Squeak's computational power to the student as the
   student masters each skill (as a fertile platform for supporting eToys and
   beyond eToys)
   - Continuing its support for the modern web
   communication infrastructure. The web has become the UI of the people (not
   by choice, design, or superiority) but has, in effect, unified the public
   of many nations (E pluribus unum) with the power provided by computational
   tools. I believe doing so will help expose Squeak's capabilities to more
   developers who can use it. Computational thinking has grown beyond one
   person to one machine to one software platform.

My best wishes for all the candidates and for a prosperous new year to the
Squeak and Smalltalk community. Thank you for all your work up to now and
into the future.

- Darius Clarke
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