Sorry, I am in conversation with myself again (that's because I like so much the company of intelligent people). Actually, the Squeak Foundation could do something very important here: hire somebody to review and reject/approve the patches/goodies, test (and regression) test them on multiple platforms, then incorporate them into the core. It would still not be as good as many users, but it would force everyone into a user once they are incorporated. This could all happen on multiple branches as well. I am sure this would increase developer satisfaction and productivity, as well as the quality of the Squeak platform in general. It would still not bring us new users though and eventually we need them.
Florin
mateoc_florin@jpmorgan.com on 04/27/2001 01:44:23 PM
Please respond to squeak@cs.uiuc.edu
To: squeak@cs.uiuc.edu cc: (bcc: Florin X Mateoc) Subject: Re: Ameliorating/refactoring Squeak
Hi,
Like many others on this list, I know exactly what you are saying, but I have no idea on how to improve things, because what we need is users (one can only develop in the void for so long) and I don't know how to get them. The problem, as I see it, is that we are not (nor do we have) a community of users (or application developers), who might be interested in a specific functionality or improvement. It would be those users (or application developers working on top) of the main system who would be interested to test and take improvements even when not radiating from the center. Then they would give us feedback and multiple virtuos circles would emerge. Instead, we all are ring 1 developers, only willing to try new things coming from ring 0, so the only chance to get our code tested (and maintainable) is if ring 0 accepts it in the core and pushes it outside. I don't think there is much else ring 0 can do for us. As an example, some time ago I sent some code directly to Dan Ingalls. He was very nice (he always is) and he posted it to the list saying it was interesting and asking people to test it. Although this was coming from Ring -1 Himself, nobody replied. I guess nobody went to the trouble of manually filing it in, trying to understand it, trying to break it and so on. And I am not better than enybody else here. I noticed similar things happening with other people's code and I did not find the time to do testing, debugging. And this is because I am not a user of the system, but a developer and in the little spare time that I have I prefer to do my own hacking. I hope the Squeak Foundation can come up with some answers but I doubt it. I think the only real hope is that Squeak becomes a Disney success story as a kid's learnig/playing tool. Then we'll have all the users we want (need).
Florin
wuyts@iam.unibe.ch on 04/27/2001 10:22:12 AM
Please respond to squeak@cs.uiuc.edu
To: squeak@cs.uiuc.edu cc: (bcc: Florin X Mateoc) Subject: Ameliorating/refactoring Squeak
Hello, The last days I am thinking about lots of things in Smalltalk, Smalltalk communities, Smalltalk development environments, ... You could call this an existential problem, only that it has to do with Smalltalk, and not so much with my 'inner self'.
It's not that I am posing questions whether or not to keep on using Smalltalk. Quite the contrary: I have been using it for 8 or 9 years now, and its conceptual beauty still strikes me regularly. So, the question is not whether or not to keep on using Smalltalk, but what to do with it.
Personally, what I typically end up doing is to clean up parts of it. Every time I have to implement something, I sooner or later end up making bigger or smaller refactorings in the System itself (as well as in my code of course). While this pleases me enormously (it makes it far more conceptually esthetic), I never know what to do with these changes afterwards. Sometimes I send them to the list here, but they are not included with the base release. Note that this is no remark whatsoever against Squeak central (they already do a terrific job, for which I am very thankful); I completely understand that they have other goals and do not have the manpower to try and integrate such changes. However, the net result is that these 'ameliorations/refactorings/...' are forgotten over time.
After discussing with Stephane Ducasse (my colleague here in Bern), he created the Swiki pages to note these kinds of things. And we are in contact with John Sarkela to add to the Stable Squeak effort. But still...
Is there anything that can be done ? Am I just to overly aesthetic ? Did I overlook a special prefix that I can use to send this kinds of things in the mailing list ? Do they have a chance to be included if I make them for the latest Squeak versions ? Etc etc etc
-- Roel Wuyts Software Composition Group Roel.Wuyts@iam.unibe.ch University of Bern, Switzerland Board member of the European Smalltalk User Group: www.esug.org
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