My own Squeak direction

Folks -

I feel like the recent discussion about directions left us without much
progress in terms of where we think Squeak is headed. I actually don't
think this is particularly hard to formulate, since as we all know,
Squeak will be headed where we make it head to. In other words, I think
we could come up with a pretty good idea of where Squeak will be headed
if those people who actually contribute tell a little bit more about
their interests and directions. So let me be the first to start here:

My long-term vision for Squeak is to bring it back to being a medium for
personal dynamic media. I want Squeak to be a fun, educational, small,
dynamic, media-centric environment. My current immediate directions include:

* Making the system be more modular. Adding the Morphic TextEditors,
refactoring Project, being able to unload various packages are in line
with that. Expect more from me in this area as time allows.

* Figuring out how to load packages, projects, etc back in. I haven't
done much about this yet, but we desperately need better tools for
(roughly speaking) "loading apps". Squeakmap gets some things right,
Universes address others, both aren't very well integrated with
Monticello, and by the end of the day the UIs for all of them suck.

* Restore the media facilities. I'd really like to see the next Squeak
version bring back Speech, bring back Games, bring back Wonderland etc.
All in loadable project form so that people can explore them based on a
small initial foot print.

I'd be interested in hearing what others working on and in Squeak have
to say about their own directions. Together it should give a pretty
comprehensive understanding about where Squeak is headed in practice.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

>>>>> "Andreas" == Andreas Raab <[hidden email]> writes:

Andreas> I'd be interested in hearing what others working on and in Squeak
Andreas> have to say about their own directions. Together it should give a
Andreas> pretty comprehensive understanding about where Squeak is headed in
Andreas> practice.

I think you're on the right track.  I'd like to see Squeak core get smaller,
faster, more powerful, but at the same time anything of substance we remove
still be loadable from SqueakSource or some nice dependency mechanism.

Oh yeah, and I want a pony.

:-)

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[hidden email]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion

I would like to make a Squeak.dll that is callable by other application programs like Computer Aided Design software (CAD). I want to make addons to these programs using Squeak for the addons. A Squeak.dll will allow Squeak to be used in many situations where dll's are used to do invisible work for the main application programs.

All the best,
Aik-Siong Koh

askoh wrote:
> I would like to make a Squeak.dll that is callable by other application
> programs like Computer Aided Design software (CAD). I want to make addons to
> these programs using Squeak for the addons. A Squeak.dll will allow Squeak
> to be used in many situations where dll's are used to do invisible work for
> the main application programs.

In which case you might be interested in the current vm-dev thread
starting here:

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2009-November/003385.html

and I just announced a prototype that could in fact be linked from
elsewhere:

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2009-November/003437.html

Cheers,
   - Andreas

Andreas,

Personal dynamic media sounds excellent, media experience and malleability
is what brought me to squeak in the first place. I agree with all your
points modularity, packaging, projects and media. I use squeak for
computational fun and learning in algorithms, art, music, presentations,
information management etc.

Outside the image, I would like to see improvements in the vm; speed, 64bit
(image too), multicore and better ffi.

Travis

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email]
[mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Andreas
Raab
Sent: Saturday, November 14, 2009 3:29 PM
To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Subject: [squeak-dev] My own Squeak direction

Folks -

I feel like the recent discussion about directions left us without much
progress in terms of where we think Squeak is headed. I actually don't
think this is particularly hard to formulate, since as we all know,
Squeak will be headed where we make it head to. In other words, I think
we could come up with a pretty good idea of where Squeak will be headed
if those people who actually contribute tell a little bit more about
their interests and directions. So let me be the first to start here:

My long-term vision for Squeak is to bring it back to being a medium for
personal dynamic media. I want Squeak to be a fun, educational, small,
dynamic, media-centric environment. My current immediate directions include:

* Making the system be more modular. Adding the Morphic TextEditors,
refactoring Project, being able to unload various packages are in line
with that. Expect more from me in this area as time allows.

* Figuring out how to load packages, projects, etc back in. I haven't
done much about this yet, but we desperately need better tools for
(roughly speaking) "loading apps". Squeakmap gets some things right,
Universes address others, both aren't very well integrated with
Monticello, and by the end of the day the UIs for all of them suck.

* Restore the media facilities. I'd really like to see the next Squeak
version bring back Speech, bring back Games, bring back Wonderland etc.
All in loadable project form so that people can explore them based on a
small initial foot print.

I'd be interested in hearing what others working on and in Squeak have
to say about their own directions. Together it should give a pretty
comprehensive understanding about where Squeak is headed in practice.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

El sáb, 14-11-2009 a las 15:28 -0800, Andreas Raab escribió:

>
> I'd be interested in hearing what others working on and in Squeak have
> to say about their own directions. Together it should give a pretty
> comprehensive understanding about where Squeak is headed in practice.
>

I would like a timeline for squeak and a list of goals (the list you and
Igor have written is a good start) and of course a release date.

Speaking of that, the following presentation can be a good advise:

<a href="http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/27/Release%20Mismanagement_%20How%">http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/27/Release%20Mismanagement_%20How%
20to%20Alienate%20Users%20and%20Frustrate%20Developers%
20Presentation.pdf

http://www.hyrumwright.org/papers/floss2009.pdf

found on:

http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/7823



Cheers
--
Miguel Cobá
http://miguel.leugim.com.mx

Andreas Raab wrote:
> Folks -
>
> I feel like the recent discussion about directions left us without
> much progress in terms of where we think Squeak is headed. I actually
> don't think this is particularly hard to formulate, since as we all
> know, Squeak will be headed where we make it head to. In other words,
> I think we could come up with a pretty good idea of where Squeak will
> be headed if those people who actually contribute tell a little bit
> more about their interests and directions.

No matter how many times we said this, from what I see in responses to
this thread, it seems people still don't get it.

My own Squeak direction is described in
http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/Index.html . As it seems to be
incompatible with that of many in the community, it requires a fork.

Aside from that, I fully support your direction, and I'll try to keep
helping. Of course, I'd be delighted if at least some of my objectives
were adopted for Squeak too.

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich

>>>>> "Miguel" == Miguel Enrique Cobá Martinez <[hidden email]> writes:

Miguel> I would like a timeline for squeak and a list of goals (the list you
Miguel> and Igor have written is a good start) and of course a release date.

You can't have timelines and release dates without committed resources.

Are you committing yourself?  If so, cool.  That's one. :)

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[hidden email]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion

El sáb, 14-11-2009 a las 20:24 -0800, Randal L. Schwartz escribió:
> >>>>> "Miguel" == Miguel Enrique Cobá Martinez <[hidden email]> writes:
>
> Miguel> I would like a timeline for squeak and a list of goals (the list you
> Miguel> and Igor have written is a good start) and of course a release date.
>
> You can't have timelines and release dates without committed resources.
>
> Are you committing yourself?  If so, cool.  That's one. :)

Maybe this is a chicken and egg problem then.

Without clear or at least focused goals and proposed timelines (they
don't have to be set in stone) the people can't know in *what* they can
help. And without people seeing a direction and goals, they can't
propose themselves for some specific task solving.

So, yes, I will help, but I can't be sure in what. Also, as I have
already said, isn't only code that Squeak needs, also needs *promotion*,
tutorials, blog posts, users reporting fixes (even if they (we) can't
solve them) and a lot of thing more than code.

But, count me in. I will help in whatever is in my possibilities and
capabilities.

--
Miguel Cobá
http://miguel.leugim.com.mx

Juan Vuletich wrote:
> No matter how many times we said this, from what I see in responses to
> this thread, it seems people still don't get it.

Not unexpectedly ;-) I can see both sides though; on the one hand it's
difficult to describe exactly where Squeak will be without having a set
of known resources. On the other hand, the question of where Squeak is
headed is certainly a fair one. As a result, I'm trying to answer the
question by looking at the resources that are being committed to
improving Squeak, i.e., summarize what people actually work on and try
to project where this will get us.

> My own Squeak direction is described in
> http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/Index.html . As it seems to be
> incompatible with that of many in the community, it requires a fork.

I don't think that the goals are incompatible. With more work on
modularity, I think that your goals can be a subset of those in the
larger community (just as my goals are a subset of those).

> Aside from that, I fully support your direction, and I'll try to keep
> helping. Of course, I'd be delighted if at least some of my objectives
> were adopted for Squeak too.

Absolutely. I agree with a lot of what you're writing. I have some
different ideas in various areas but on a fundamental level I think we
have fairly compatible ideas.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

On 15.11.2009, at 03:46, Travis Kay wrote:

>  I would like to see [..] 64bit (image too)

Curious: what would you do if you could have a huge image?

- Bert -

Personal media, multimedia capabilities, eToys and all the goals
mentioned by Andreas are my own also, and I think that they don't
exclude the Juan goals. Between these I agree particularly with

* Developers working for devices with little memory or CPU power.

thinking in embedded development.

But, and is a big but on my pov, I wants also all the possibilities to
make web development. I don't like the idea of think that to web dev I
should switch to Pharo. Is hard to maintain myself updated with one
product, I can't imagine how to stay up-to-date with two.

As Miguel mentioned in another thread, the mostly paying people on our
days is paying for web projects and I wants to develop them using
Squeak.

I wish a Squeak capable of run:

- Seaside
- Aida
- Iliad
- SWT (I'm porting right now to the trunk image)

in addition to all the other goals named before.

Count me in to help also, in my really very very limited free time.

Cheers.





2009/11/15 Andreas Raab <[hidden email]>:

On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 02:39:24PM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> On 15.11.2009, at 03:46, Travis Kay wrote:
>
> >  I would like to see [..] 64bit (image too)
>
> Curious: what would you do if you could have a huge image?

Good question. The original Squeak 64-bit image is about five years
old now, and does not seem to have attracted much interest of a practical
nature:

  http://squeakvm.org/squeak64/dist3/Squeak64-3.8g-6548.image.tar.gz

An updated version of this image, suitable for use on current Squeak
VMs, is here:

  http://squeakvm.org/squeak64/sq64-dtl.zip

You do need to build your own VM to use this image. There is nothing
exotic about it, you just have to click the "64-bit image" checkbox
on VMMaker to activate the 64-bit object memory version.

John McIntosh with support from ESUG is planning to do new work for
a Mac VM, including 64-bit object memory support. Hopefully this will
encourage new interest in the topic.

Help needed: Currently there is no way to convert new images (Squeak trunk,
Cuis, Pharo, etc) into 64-bit format. If anyone has some expertise with
SystemTracer, it would be good to get this working.

  http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=5239
  http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=5240

Dave
 

There is currently a package dependency for VMMaker that requires the
entire Speech package (for KlattSynthesizerPlugin). This can be resolved
through a minor refactoring of Speech, mainly to move the shared pool
class KlattResonatorIndices into a separate package, e.g. "SharedPool-Speech".

Are there any objections to adopting the package name "SharedPool-Speech"
for this? By implication, we might also have "SharedPool-FFI" and so forth.

If no objections, I'll make a SqueakSource project for Speech, starting
with the Speech-md.9.mcz from Squeak 3.9a, and updating it as described.
With that in place, VMMaker will be loadable with just the shared pool
prerequisite, rather than the entire Speech package.

No flame wars please, just speak up if there is a good reason that I
should *not* do this.

Thanks!

On 15.11.2009, at 16:48, David T. Lewis wrote:

Wouldn't it make more sense to have packages named "Speech-Shared" and "Speech-Plugin" containing the shared pool and the plugin, respectively? That would go along well with the 8 or so other Speech categories.

Trying to have Speech as a single package is futile anyway since as you suggested it needs to be broken up.

- Bert -

On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 05:03:11PM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
That would be a good logical organization, but doesn't that require
splitting the existing Speech package into a total of 9 or 10 categories?

@German Arduino

"But, and is a big but on my pov, I wants also all the possibilities to
make web development. I don't like the idea of think that to web dev I
should switch to Pharo."

This is an interesting point. I think it can arouse more fear than is necessary, though. 

For Squeak to run Seaside is trivial. Seaside lays on top of the networking capabilities of Squeak. It's not invasive in its demands. I think Andreas is more concerned with plugins and lower level stuff. Wonderland, Morphic, Etoys, and drumming bunnies floating in 3D are more fundamental plumbing problems than Seaside. 

The question about compatibility of future Seasides, or Aida releases rests more with the maintainers of those projects than with Squeak. I've settled on Seaside 2.8.3 as the last version of Seaside I'm going to bother with. It's clear to me from things Julian Fitzel has said that the Seaside maintainers will not be porting to Squeak. They plan to develop for Pharo exclusively. At the moment they are looking for a Squeak maintainer, somebody to convert what they're doing to Squeak. They may have found one already, I don't know. 

And I don't care. 2.8.3 is delightful. I don't see anything in 2.9 (WAPainter, addition of jQuery written in Smalltalk ( I can do that myself, thanks) and greater modularity (which only benefits Gemstone, Cincom, etc), use of other servers (Comanche is the only one I want)) that I want or need. I'm not going to chase them to rewrite my code every time they make a change. 

I don't see anything in Seaside 3.0 et alia that I can't live without. Seaside is not an application. It's a framework. It's there for me to reshape, and as far as I'm concerned 2.8.3 and my slowly growing skill set are all I'll need. 

 The tipping point between stability of platform and the supposed benefit of new features coming out of Europe has me thinking that it has evolved to be all it needs to be and any new things its maintainers will develop for it will not be worth the effort required to chase them. 

I'm content to watch Pharo take new Seaside releases and disappear over the horizon. 

Chris 

Clever title:)

I'm new around here, but here's a short list of things that I fancy
(being the Fancy New Guy) doing with Squeak:

- Media. I want to kill Powerpoint. I've been playing around with a
minimalist "app" which hopes to fool the user into thinking they're
using a presentation program. I love how I can just drop things into
my image and get objects to play with.

- Themes. Something like Polymorph, but leaner. Working on it.

- Music. I want to make music with Squeak. Has anyone heard of Siren
or DynaPiano?

After this point, beware of crazy ideas...

- User interface. I want to jettison my desktop environment and live
in a Squeak image all the time. I'm sick of hating things about my
desktop environment, and finding that the cost of changing them is too
high. This desire necessitates the following three research ideas...

- Embed Firefox or WebKit in the Squeak VM.
- Implement a reparenting X11 window manager in Squeak, allowing it to
run GTK apps (like Firefox)
- Embed the v8 Javascript VM into the Squeak VM and then work on
making Scamper standards compliant. I tried rolling v8 into a plugin a
few months back, but found my ignorance of the Squeak VM to be a
barrier.

I think that modelessness is the way to go. I still need web-mode,
which is really the only thing (I want) that's hard to do entirely in
Smalltalk.

This thread is a lot more fun than the one where we argue about who's
ideas are *the* direction! :)

On Saturday, November 14, 2009, Andreas Raab <[hidden email]> wrote:
--
Ron

On 15-Nov-09, at 8:46 AM, David T. Lewis wrote:

To elaborate a bit, it's not a good idea to have overlapping packages  
in Monticello 1.x. So if there's a package named "Speech-Shared",  
there should not be a package named "Speech." That would imply that  
the other categories "Speech-*" are all separate packages. That's  
probably not what we want.

David, "SharedPool-Speech" sounds good to me.

Colin

--
Cédrick