All,
E-toys has a long history memorialized in places like Google and as has been mentioned elsewhere e-toys will continue to have an association with Squeak because of OLPC. People will be introduced to Squeak in part because of e-toys. All other considerations aside, if e-toys is unloaded from the main distribution and cannot be easily reloaded by a new Squeaker, there will be confusion and for many disappointment and/or some other non-positive experience.
I changed the subject to "Smalltalk Reloaded" because like Neo in The Matrix, many of us have been down this path before. There's a larger, older problem looming which the Smalltalk community has not fared well with in the past. Ron has touched on some issues about how we function together in this community. For me, they speak to Smalltalk being "for the creative spirit in everyone" which is what I originally bought into 25 years ago. Dave Thomas put it well:
Smalltalk is much more than a programming language, it is a complete environment that
represents the true philosophy of open, user-driven computing. Smalltalk provides an
environment that makes programming fun for young and old, and it shields us from the
plethora of APIs and technology our industry calls progress. It respects the disparate
cultures of business programmers, students and systems programmers. Most of all it
encourages "we" programming as opposed to "me" programming.
Travels With Smalltalk
In the early 90's, before Java Smalltalk had a thriving prosperous community. IBM, ParcPlace and Digitalk offerings were gaining momentum in large corporations where C++ was failing miserably in enterprise projects. Many(most?) new major projects were choosing Smalltalk(Object-Oriented Information Systems by David Taylor documents this). Small and independent developers could learn from the affordable Smalltalk/V family and with the advent of Widgets/WindowBuilder could deploy solutions with it. Books were being written. If you were a knowledgeable Smalltalker, you could make a good living doing it. Then lots of smart people couldn't figure out a reasonable, mutually beneficial way forward. It really doesn't matter who you think was "more" to blame, the vacuum that was filled by Java wasn't created by anti-Smalltalkers, it came from the implosions within the community.
There are interesting parallels to where Smalltalk is today, but the difference is that given a little bit more time, Croquet, Spoon and the Strongtalk VM will provide a powerful flexible, mutually beneficial way forward. In the interim, we need IMO to avoid the kinds of implosions we've seen in the past. Making an etoyless main Squeak distribution that can't reload e-toys is an implosion. If you're feeling impatient, consider that some of us have been at it for several decades and are still here to encourage you - you and Smalltalk can survive a wait.
Seeking a respectful and fun way forward for everyone,
Laurence
On 10/24/06, [hidden email] <[hidden email]> wrote:
Markus Gaelli <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Count me in.
> Markus
Ok! So I counted 4-5 people. Two questions:
1. Would it be a real problem if you were instead forced to use the
Squeakland image etc?
Not for knowledgeable Squeakers who follow the list and are aware of the different distros(I wonder what that count is). However, given
2. Are you committed in the extent that you would actually join an eToys
team making it loadable? Juan has already shown that it can be ripped
out - next step would be making it loadable I presume.
It seems to me that the folks proposing to remove something with so much history and current usage.
Why not have a an eToy-less image that
regards, Göran
Locked
