Matthew, By the right thing too soon, I think there are influential people who are not yet ready to allow Squeak to change. I do not necessarily agree that Stef et al. have rekindled interest in Smalltalk so much as they have given many new hope for Squeak to realize its potential to be a clean fast and robust open source Smalltalk. Bill -----Original Message----- From: pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr [mailto:pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr] On Behalf Of Matthew Fulmer Sent: Sunday, March 01, 2009 11:12 PM To: pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr Subject: {Spam?} Re: [Pharo-project] A point a.k.a excuse to you On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 08:47:53PM -0500, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:
My sense is that Matthew is doing the right thing, with the best of intentions, but might be trying it too soon.
I would appreciate it if you would expand on that.
Pharo is establishing a spirit of finding the common problem and solving it such that we can all have what we want.
I believe you are correct, but not everybody sees Pharo that way. Edgar and Keith in particular, sometimes see it as non-appreciation of their work, which is similar in spirit, but not as well managed. Others have more vague objections I don't yet understand.
As Gandhi put it, "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." Some of those pressuring you have probably just moved on from ridicule.
Let me apologize on behalf of the squeak-dev community. Not all of us feel so harshly toward you, but I did not speak up enough to convince you of our appreciation. You deserve better, and I'm sorry we did not deliver it.
Making Pharo the best it can be will be a win for everyone, even if some do not see it that way at the time.
I plan to work with Pharo soon, probably once summer starts and school is out, to get Keith's tools debugged and working in the context of Pharo, especially Monticello 1.6 (My patches to MC1.5 to enable real atomic loading (= no more problems upgrading Polymorph), and Bob (the automated image builder and regression tester). I know this is deep stuff, but I believe an automated image builder will have several advantages, both for you, as Pharo developers, and for me, as an enthusiast for cross-squeak compatibility: - making releases is faster - Regression bugs are caught faster - the scripts serve as poor-man's code sharing between squeak distributions until we have real package-level sharing of core code between core You may or may not know, but I am a core Cobalt developer, and I hope to bring Pharo and Cobalt much closer together. These two projects are hosting many core changes to the image, with little regard to backward compatibility. We may even get tweak to the level where it is a compelling replacement for Morphic, and I want Pharo to benefit from that if it does indeed happen. Too many improvements to Squeak happen in the dark (Newspeak, Spoon), and we can ill afford to estrange the truly open projects from each other (Pharo and Cobalt, IMO).
Thanks for doing this!
Yes, thank you Stef and Marcus for rekindling the passion for Smalltalk in many people. With luck, squeak.org may be a free, open, and useful product again. Too long has it been stuck, with nobody to bring it forward. Pharo has done much to re-awaken the love of smalltalk in many people, and that, if nothing else, is a gift beyond measure. As Squeak.org release team leader, you have my goodwill and my support. I will do what I can to spread the gifts of your efforts to the rest of squeak, and bring their efforts to you. -- Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/ _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project