[Squeakfoundation]Re: Proposal for TWO official releases

[Maarten Maartensz]

Hello Hannes,

At 00:08 19-4-02 +0100, you wrote:

>Maarten Maartensz <maartens@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> Summarizing the drift of some recent mails I'd propose the following to
>> both Squeak.org and the Squakfoundation:
>> 
>> - To maintain TWO releases as a standard policy:
>>     A. Developers' release 
>>     B. Learning & Teaching release
>> 
>In a sense we will have these two releases:
>
>A:  version 3.3a
>B:  version 3.2 final

Well ... yes: "In a sense", for 3.2 isn't finalized yet. And my intention
is that a Learning & Teaching release is an image that comes with a
considerable amount of Active Essays that show newbies how to work with
Squeak.

One problem here simply seems to be that there are quite a few people on
the developers' list who write excellent code (alas, often without
comments) but far fewer people who articulate their excellent understanding
of some of Squeak's many aspects in the form of an Active Essay (or
BookMorph) that would make their understanding easily shared with people
who haven't yet (quite) mastered those aspects.

It seems this is something that should be a SqueakFoundation effort of
several people. If and when the Foundation finally gets together I am quite
willing to try to do something in this direction, if indeed some others,
with a better understanding of Squeak than I have at present, are also
willing to do something in this direction.

A simple example of what I have in mind: I discovered Squeak in July 2001,
and have more to do than just Squeaking.
In SqueakNews of October there were several projects by Naala Brewster
explaining aspects of Squeak which would have saved me a considerable
amount of tinkering and experimenting to find out just these things that I
could have grasped in 10 minutes had I had those projects in a standard
Squeak image. As it was, it took some weeks of my free time.

I guess most newbies can give their own examples of "If I'd only seen such
and such before, it would have saved me a lot of time and tinkering". And
of course, many will give up, not through stupidity or lack of interest,
but because they don't have enough free time to resolve the many
introductory problems that are nowhere systematically resolved for them.
Well, I think this mostly can be avoided:

If a number of knowledgeable people get together and produce some 20 or so
Active Essays that more or less systematically explain the fundamentals of
Squeak; have these Essays checked by the community; and include them in the
official image, this would very much alleviate the problems most newbies
have with Squeak, especially those who are new to Smalltalk. 

Regards,

Maarten.


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Maarten Maartensz. Homepage:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/ 
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