On 26-04-2012 11:31, Sean P. DeNigris wrote:
Yes this is the key! It's not "let's build all these great frameworks on top of the system", but "we need a clean, beautiful system that people can use and explore and build on without tearing their hair out in frustration" [1] and some of the components are so messy that the only clear path forward is replacement. This is not a criticism of Squeak. Many parts of Squeak (and Squeak itself was intended as just a "tool to think" about the next evolution) were spikes, not real implementations but experiments. So the usual advice that it's better to clean than to rewrite does not apply. Proofs of concept are meant to be thrown away!
Yes, that's true: some times replacements are necessary. Thing is that historical smalltalk distros were not devised in modular way. Particularly they didn't have the idea of core system and foundation classes and that lead to a development model that depended on non orthogonal stuff (meaning: at some point it got difficult to insulate causes of trouble and fixing one thing lead to problems in other things). Situation was further complicated by the fact that sometimes problems found in certain areas were "solved" by building new packages to deal with them and these new packages should live side by side with old ones. In terms of maintenance it is pretty like hell. The efforts of generating minimal images (cores) are extremely healthy: to do so it is necessary to eliminate much undesired inter-dependencies. Besides people are minding about the real necessity of having different things to deal with the same stuff (like file and directory management). Another aspect of it is that people are enhancing code where possible or just replacing things that are fubar. I guess that one thing for immediate future of an open source "industry grade" smalltalk is to define foundation classes to deal with core functionality (file and directory management, (inter)networking, multimedia, interfacing with OS, user interface (including seamless use of full screen display and OpenGL), etc, etc, etc. IMO, interfacing with OS and foreign libraries is something that must be seen "with love" because FFI is not well behaved and as VMs were designed for past generation x86-32bit (mono-core single-thread) architectures. There is a lot to do in terms of porting things to the new 64bit multi-core multi-thread hardware architectures. I remember that around 2010 there were hot discussions about having multi-core multi-thread support in VM but now things are quite silent. Also, the last things I saw about 64bit images date from 2010.
Each of these components brings us closer to a clean, beautiful, Smalltalk-inspired system "and users are expected to build on that directly". The Smalltalk-inspired part is crucial also. Until I got that, I was plagued by questions of interoperability and backward-compatibility (which are obviously still nice, but subordinate to evolution).
I see Squeak and Pharo's goals aligning more and more and, sure, it is frustrating to duplicate efforts. Although, maybe we'd all be complacent without the friendly rivalry. As the Zen master said, "we'll see..." [2]
[1] I can't imagine someone putting FileDirectory and friends through serious use and not praying for something like Filesystem. And a programming environment without built-in support for https?? Zodiac is a fundamental piece of the system. These things are not "buzz", but core components that let us get back to work and play, instead of beating our heads against soul-crushing constructs like "FileDirectory extensionFor: file name" instead of "file extension"
[2] A boy is given a horse on his 14th birthday. Everyone in the village says, âOh how wonderful.â But a Zen master who lives in the village says, âWe'll see.â 'The boy falls off the horse and breaks his foot. Everyone in the village says, âOh how awful.â The Zen master says, âWe'll see.â The village is thrown into war and all the young men have to go to war. But, because of the broken foot, the boy stays behind. Everyone says, âOh, how wonderful.â The Zen master says, âWe'll see.â
Cheers, Sean
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Best regards, CdAB