On Jun 20, 2009, at 5:37 PM, Janko Mivšek wrote:
Hi Marcus,
I agree that compatibility reduce possibility to evolve/improve the system. But on the other hand being not compatible you risk to stay alone.
I think that everything lyes in clever judgment: how much to sty compatible and how much go into new, fresh and deeper waters.
yes we will see.
I'm sure it is good not to touch the Smalltalk core things like syntax and this is even not needed, Smalltalk fathers did a really good job to make its syntax eternally useful and feature complete.
exact. The Smalltalk syntax is nearly good. We have one for scripting in addition.
Libraries are something to evolve, but again very carefully the fundamental parts (collections,...) while other, like GUI, well, here are a lot of opportunities to evolve.
We will certainly touch the MOP (or its absence in Smalltalk). I want a safer Smalltalk I want security concept cool sandbox cool module may be new concurrency model new compilers well modularised system fast loading I would love to have cool visibility mechanism pluggable type systems
Best regards Janko
P.S.: Yes, that's how I evolve Aida/Web. Some parts are fixed, while other evolve like crazy. Without much compatibility hassles, so far.
May be at the end we will fork again and create something for researcher only but at least starting from a clean system. I see that as sound evolution. Stef