Re: [Pharo-project] [squeak-dev] The future of Squeak & Pharo (was Re: [ANN] Pharo MIT license clean)
Hi! (still cross posting, hope you don't mind) Gary Dunn wrote:
I am new here and not really qualified to comment on this issue. Please take my input as having good intentions. Specifically, I do not want to start a flame war over the pros and cons of various projects.
Nah, we don't do flame wars in the Squeak community. Well, not bad ones at least :)
There is much to learn from the history of the BSD community. (Disclaimer: I am a huge fan of FreeBSD.) The FreeBSD project began with the goal of creating an open-source OS for Intel i386 hardware that was as faithful as possible to BSD Unix. In time the developers were going in three directions. One group wanted high performance, a second wanted portability to every possible platform, and a third wanted high reliability and security. There were also the usual personality conflicts and differing opinions on how to manage the project. Eventually it forked, twice, giving us FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. Each has its own personality, its own strengths. The good news is they cross-pollinate each other.
Yeah, that would be a positive future. And I have in fact earlier strongly advocated the fact that we need to "live with forks" because we already have several of them (like Croquet, OLPC etc). But see below... [SNIP]
It looks to me like Pharo is a Smalltalk for building grown-up apps. Very much like the Smalltalk I began with, which produced apps with the look and feel of the host Microsoft Windows. I think there is a need for that. I take it Pharo is new, and as such it has been luring developers away from Squeak. The potential for good in this outweighs whatever the negative consequences may be, because, like the BSDs, the Squeak developers can always pull in what they like from Pharo.
In a "perfect world", yes. I even started the DeltaStreams project with these cross pollination scenarios in my head.
Do not confuse a fork with a divorce. Think of it as mitosis. The more the merrier.
Yes, that is also the way I have argued about it. See: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-August/119471.ht...
I believe that the impact of Squeak on education has yet to be realized. The necessary hardware -- the visionary Dynabook -- is just appearing. It will be years before there are enough skilled teachers for the critical mass required for the paradigm shift to occur. And there is the culture change, so difficult in a field as institutionalized as modern education. What we have been seeing are the Smalltalk explorers and trail blazers, the pioneers to whom we will someday owe an enormous debt of gratitude.
Possibly true, but Smalltalk, Squeak, Etoys and even Croquet have been around for quite some time now - and we haven't seen any real explosion yet. Croquet was meant to "explode" but hasn't. So I am not holding my breath for "the day Squeak gets popular" :)
I am in no position to recommend anything here, but I will just the same. Please forgive me. I recommend that Squeak not be killed off, or merged. Let the fork live on.
Nothing to forgive, I want to hear lots of opinions in order for me to personally form an opinion about the idea. The "view" you present above is a positive one of a forked world. The reality can be harsher: Take XFree86 vs XOrg for example. The history there is complicated but the fact remains - XOrg started, added lots of "cool features" quickly while XFree86 stood still, then when the developers started heavily voting with their feet the distros also switched and XFree86 was dead before it even hit the floor. There are mainly two aspects here that tells me that the above "bad future of XFree86" is more likely to happen than the "good future of Open/Net/FreeBSD": - Pharo may "sound" like it has a different agenda than Squeak.org but IMO the large majority of Squeak.org developers share the Pharo agenda. Thus the differentiation is not there. Most people will just pick the one with the most momentum, and that is Pharo. - Squeak.org is standing still. Sure, there are things being done by some people, no doubt about that. But perception is *everything* and from the outside it seems to be standing still. Even the squeak-dev list is quieting down and that is a bad sign. So although I share your basic view of cross pollinating forks being a "Good Thing" and something we should embrace (see OLPC, Squeakland, Croquet etc etc) such forks need to have a specific goal. IMHO Pharo is not such a fork, Pharo is still very much "generic" as is Squeak.org. Pharo is more like "Squeak.org going agile" or "Smalltalk, with less talk" :). And thus it resembles XOrg much, much more than OpenBSD.
I cannot close without saying that "Phreak" would be a very bad name :-)
Again, I wasn't even advocating a name change - although a name change may be a good thing if we would merge. Also, I hate to say it, but "Pharo" sucks pretty bad too I think, and you guys STILL have attracted lots of developers :) :) Oh, and a final note: But what if Squeak.org is abandoned and everyone moves to Pharo, what is so bad about letting that happen? It is NOT bad. But I think we could do it in a smoother way and actually turn this into something *positive*. The merge could be turned into a real BOOST to Squeak/Pharo. regards, Göran
A partial reply on the topic of education: in the spirit of Alan's "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" talk, it will likely be a while (perhaps decades) before before people start to figure out how to make real progress in education through computers. However and whenever it happens, I will go out on the following limb: it will be adults who enable it. There is nothing wrong with Pharo's focus on "grown-up software," and that should actually be encouraged. Toys can easily be built on top of such a subtrate, but a toy is unlikely to be a good foundation for tools. Since we have uses for tools and toys, the sound approach is to start with the tools and build the toys on top of the same foundation that Pinesoft and others use to serve paying customers. Bill -----Original Message----- From: pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr [mailto:pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr] On Behalf Of Göran Krampe Sent: Sunday, June 28, 2009 5:24 AM To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list Cc: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] [squeak-dev] The future of Squeak & Pharo (was Re: [ANN] Pharo MIT license clean) Hi! (still cross posting, hope you don't mind) Gary Dunn wrote:
I am new here and not really qualified to comment on this issue. Please take my input as having good intentions. Specifically, I do not want to start a flame war over the pros and cons of various projects.
Nah, we don't do flame wars in the Squeak community. Well, not bad ones at least :)
There is much to learn from the history of the BSD community. (Disclaimer: I am a huge fan of FreeBSD.) The FreeBSD project began with the goal of creating an open-source OS for Intel i386 hardware that was as faithful as possible to BSD Unix. In time the developers were going in three directions. One group wanted high performance, a second wanted portability to every possible platform, and a third wanted high reliability and security. There were also the usual personality conflicts and differing opinions on how to manage the project. Eventually it forked, twice, giving us FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. Each has its own personality, its own strengths. The good news is they cross-pollinate each other.
Yeah, that would be a positive future. And I have in fact earlier strongly advocated the fact that we need to "live with forks" because we already have several of them (like Croquet, OLPC etc). But see below... [SNIP]
It looks to me like Pharo is a Smalltalk for building grown-up apps. Very much like the Smalltalk I began with, which produced apps with the look and feel of the host Microsoft Windows. I think there is a need for that. I take it Pharo is new, and as such it has been luring developers away from Squeak. The potential for good in this outweighs whatever the negative consequences may be, because, like the BSDs, the Squeak developers can always pull in what they like from Pharo.
In a "perfect world", yes. I even started the DeltaStreams project with these cross pollination scenarios in my head.
Do not confuse a fork with a divorce. Think of it as mitosis. The more the merrier.
Yes, that is also the way I have argued about it. See: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-August/119471.ht...
I believe that the impact of Squeak on education has yet to be realized. The necessary hardware -- the visionary Dynabook -- is just appearing. It will be years before there are enough skilled teachers for the critical mass required for the paradigm shift to occur. And there is the culture change, so difficult in a field as institutionalized as modern education. What we have been seeing are the Smalltalk explorers and trail blazers, the pioneers to whom we will someday owe an enormous debt of gratitude.
Possibly true, but Smalltalk, Squeak, Etoys and even Croquet have been around for quite some time now - and we haven't seen any real explosion yet. Croquet was meant to "explode" but hasn't. So I am not holding my breath for "the day Squeak gets popular" :)
I am in no position to recommend anything here, but I will just the same. Please forgive me. I recommend that Squeak not be killed off, or merged. Let the fork live on.
Nothing to forgive, I want to hear lots of opinions in order for me to personally form an opinion about the idea. The "view" you present above is a positive one of a forked world. The reality can be harsher: Take XFree86 vs XOrg for example. The history there is complicated but the fact remains - XOrg started, added lots of "cool features" quickly while XFree86 stood still, then when the developers started heavily voting with their feet the distros also switched and XFree86 was dead before it even hit the floor. There are mainly two aspects here that tells me that the above "bad future of XFree86" is more likely to happen than the "good future of Open/Net/FreeBSD": - Pharo may "sound" like it has a different agenda than Squeak.org but IMO the large majority of Squeak.org developers share the Pharo agenda. Thus the differentiation is not there. Most people will just pick the one with the most momentum, and that is Pharo. - Squeak.org is standing still. Sure, there are things being done by some people, no doubt about that. But perception is *everything* and from the outside it seems to be standing still. Even the squeak-dev list is quieting down and that is a bad sign. So although I share your basic view of cross pollinating forks being a "Good Thing" and something we should embrace (see OLPC, Squeakland, Croquet etc etc) such forks need to have a specific goal. IMHO Pharo is not such a fork, Pharo is still very much "generic" as is Squeak.org. Pharo is more like "Squeak.org going agile" or "Smalltalk, with less talk" :). And thus it resembles XOrg much, much more than OpenBSD.
I cannot close without saying that "Phreak" would be a very bad name :-)
Again, I wasn't even advocating a name change - although a name change may be a good thing if we would merge. Also, I hate to say it, but "Pharo" sucks pretty bad too I think, and you guys STILL have attracted lots of developers :) :) Oh, and a final note: But what if Squeak.org is abandoned and everyone moves to Pharo, what is so bad about letting that happen? It is NOT bad. But I think we could do it in a smoother way and actually turn this into something *positive*. The merge could be turned into a real BOOST to Squeak/Pharo. regards, Göran _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
On Jun 28, 2009, at 5:21 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:
A partial reply on the topic of education: in the spirit of Alan's "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" talk, it will likely be a while (perhaps decades) before before people start to figure out how to make real progress in education through computers.
However and whenever it happens, I will go out on the following limb: it will be adults who enable it. There is nothing wrong with Pharo's focus on "grown-up software,"
We do not focus per se on grown-up software. We focus on robust, agile, flexible... software on top of which people can build what they want. Here is a nice example: in the past there was a Sq00 syntax: an alternate syntax for newbie. This was a cool idea. Now it was implemented by patching the AST printOn: methods with mode = #SQ00 ifTrue: ... then I wonder how they could try alternate design :). They probably found the right syntax directly. Another solution is a visitor with which you can also try 3 design without polluting the default AST printOn: method.
and that should actually be encouraged. Toys can easily be built on top of such a subtrate, but a toy is unlikely to be a good foundation for tools. Since we have uses for tools and toys, the sound approach is to start with the tools and build the toys on top of the same foundation that Pinesoft and others use to serve paying customers.
Yeap. even if Etoys is far from a tool indee having a good infrastructure to prototype new ideas is really needed. When I designed BotsInc I wanted to capture the error message so I thought: no problem I capture the SyntaxError message .... well .... no SyntaxError inherited from String. So I had to patch like hell the system.
Bill
-----Original Message----- From: pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr [mailto:pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr ] On Behalf Of Göran Krampe Sent: Sunday, June 28, 2009 5:24 AM To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list Cc: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] [squeak-dev] The future of Squeak & Pharo (was Re: [ANN] Pharo MIT license clean)
Hi!
(still cross posting, hope you don't mind)
Gary Dunn wrote:
I am new here and not really qualified to comment on this issue. Please take my input as having good intentions. Specifically, I do not want to start a flame war over the pros and cons of various projects.
Nah, we don't do flame wars in the Squeak community. Well, not bad ones at least :)
There is much to learn from the history of the BSD community. (Disclaimer: I am a huge fan of FreeBSD.) The FreeBSD project began with the goal of creating an open-source OS for Intel i386 hardware that was as faithful as possible to BSD Unix. In time the developers were going in three directions. One group wanted high performance, a second wanted portability to every possible platform, and a third wanted high reliability and security. There were also the usual personality conflicts and differing opinions on how to manage the project. Eventually it forked, twice, giving us FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. Each has its own personality, its own strengths. The good news is they cross-pollinate each other.
Yeah, that would be a positive future. And I have in fact earlier strongly advocated the fact that we need to "live with forks" because we already have several of them (like Croquet, OLPC etc).
But see below...
[SNIP]
It looks to me like Pharo is a Smalltalk for building grown-up apps. Very much like the Smalltalk I began with, which produced apps with the look and feel of the host Microsoft Windows. I think there is a need for that. I take it Pharo is new, and as such it has been luring developers away from Squeak. The potential for good in this outweighs whatever the negative consequences may be, because, like the BSDs, the Squeak developers can always pull in what they like from Pharo.
In a "perfect world", yes. I even started the DeltaStreams project with these cross pollination scenarios in my head.
Do not confuse a fork with a divorce. Think of it as mitosis. The more the merrier.
Yes, that is also the way I have argued about it. See:
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-August/119471.ht...
I believe that the impact of Squeak on education has yet to be realized. The necessary hardware -- the visionary Dynabook -- is just appearing. It will be years before there are enough skilled teachers for the critical mass required for the paradigm shift to occur. And there is the culture change, so difficult in a field as institutionalized as modern education. What we have been seeing are the Smalltalk explorers and trail blazers, the pioneers to whom we will someday owe an enormous debt of gratitude.
Possibly true, but Smalltalk, Squeak, Etoys and even Croquet have been around for quite some time now - and we haven't seen any real explosion yet. Croquet was meant to "explode" but hasn't. So I am not holding my breath for "the day Squeak gets popular" :)
I am in no position to recommend anything here, but I will just the same. Please forgive me. I recommend that Squeak not be killed off, or merged. Let the fork live on.
Nothing to forgive, I want to hear lots of opinions in order for me to personally form an opinion about the idea. The "view" you present above is a positive one of a forked world. The reality can be harsher:
Take XFree86 vs XOrg for example. The history there is complicated but the fact remains - XOrg started, added lots of "cool features" quickly while XFree86 stood still, then when the developers started heavily voting with their feet the distros also switched and XFree86 was dead before it even hit the floor.
There are mainly two aspects here that tells me that the above "bad future of XFree86" is more likely to happen than the "good future of Open/Net/FreeBSD":
- Pharo may "sound" like it has a different agenda than Squeak.org but IMO the large majority of Squeak.org developers share the Pharo agenda. Thus the differentiation is not there. Most people will just pick the one with the most momentum, and that is Pharo.
- Squeak.org is standing still. Sure, there are things being done by some people, no doubt about that. But perception is *everything* and from the outside it seems to be standing still. Even the squeak-dev list is quieting down and that is a bad sign.
So although I share your basic view of cross pollinating forks being a "Good Thing" and something we should embrace (see OLPC, Squeakland, Croquet etc etc) such forks need to have a specific goal.
IMHO Pharo is not such a fork, Pharo is still very much "generic" as is Squeak.org. Pharo is more like "Squeak.org going agile" or "Smalltalk, with less talk" :). And thus it resembles XOrg much, much more than OpenBSD.
I cannot close without saying that "Phreak" would be a very bad name :-)
Again, I wasn't even advocating a name change - although a name change may be a good thing if we would merge. Also, I hate to say it, but "Pharo" sucks pretty bad too I think, and you guys STILL have attracted lots of developers :) :)
Oh, and a final note:
But what if Squeak.org is abandoned and everyone moves to Pharo, what is so bad about letting that happen? It is NOT bad. But I think we could do it in a smoother way and actually turn this into something *positive*. The merge could be turned into a real BOOST to Squeak/Pharo.
regards, Göran
_______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
Hi, is there a vm build for open solaris x86? Regards, Carlos
On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 3:32 AM, Carlos Crosetti<carlos@mostar.com.ar> wrote:
Hi, is there a vm build for open solaris x86?
I don't think so. If you build one, please tell me and I will add it to the website. -- Damien Cassou http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st "Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them." James Iry
participants (5)
-
Carlos Crosetti -
Damien Cassou -
Göran Krampe -
Schwab,Wilhelm K -
Stéphane Ducasse