Introducing Myself / FFI comments

> Folks -
>
> After long hesitation I've decided to subscribe to the Pharo list. I'm
> doing this mostly to put perspective on some issues that have come up
> here and where I feel I have a unique perspective on them. If you
> haven't guessed, I've been called many unfriendly names here, most
> recently "the FFI maintainer".
>
> Let's start there with putting some perspective on the issues.
> Fortunately, all of this discussion has been archived so we don't need
> to play "he said, she said" but I can just point you to the messages
> themselves. Lukas claims:
>
> "In fact we had that in Squeak 3.9 and early Pharo versions. I even
> wrote code that adapted this mechanism for FFI, but the FFI maintainer
> insisted on sticking with his compiler hacks."
>
> What Lukas *isn't* mentioning is that his proposal would have rendered
> all FFI code ever written nonfunctional and non-loadable. Practically
> speaking, it would have simplified two methods with fifty lines of code
> at the expense of making six years of work of many people unusable:
>
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/106992.html
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107037.html
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107039.html
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107204.html
>
> Then of course, Stef threw in his usual good-natured self and changed
> what had been a relatively issue-focused discussion into an
> old-fashioned personal assault:
>
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107124.html
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107134.html
>
> Despite that I proposed what I felt might be a workable alternative,
> which got shot down by Lukas in an instant:
>
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107136.html
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107144.html
>
> A third proposal was made, that I agreed with as will, Lukas ignored the
> proposal completely:
>
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107313.html
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107338.html
>
> At the end of the discussion, Lukas still hadn't responded to various
> compromises that I had offered to discuss with him:
>
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107309.html
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107337.html
>
> I've certainly had points in the past where some people here have every
> right to be mad at me and where I've made gross mistakes. But this
> wasn't one of those times. I've been fairly patient, took the discussion
> into whichever direction Lukas wanted, made alternative proposals,
> agreed with third party proposals, didn't even raise to the rhetoric
> bait that was thrown at me multiple times.
>
> The *one* tradeoff I wasn't willing to make for the sake of my users was
> to break their code; was to make their code non-loadable for absolutely
> no benefit for these users. Cleaning up two methods and fifty lines of
> code isn't worth breaking six years of work from lots of people. It
> wasn't then, it isn't today.
>
> And when Stef says "Some people may now understand why we finally
> decided to do Pharo." then you should probably wonder what that means in
> the context of this discussion. Finding solutions that benefit *all*
> parties involved isn't one of his primary strengths in my experience.
>
> Back to lurking for now,
>   - Andreas
>
>
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