Sophie 2.0 ported to Java. Why?

> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> "Unfortunately, despite a lot of interest among individual faculty
>> and a few small programs, the widespread institutional adoption
>> necessary to form a viable Sophie 1.0 sustaining community was not
>> happening - due in large part, our inquiries suggested, to lack of
>> interest in supporting an enterprise software application written in
>> Squeak. In the community whose support was most essential to Sophie's
>> survival, everyone wanted a language that was more widely known and
>> used; the largest single group of potential adopters wanted Java
>> [...] The Squeak contractors were understandably unhappy about the
>> move to Java, both because they lost the contract and because they
>> believe in Squeak and want to see it used more widely. We have the
>> greatest respect for their capabilities and their enthusiasm for
>> their community, but our responsibilities to our own institutions,
>> our community, and Mellon require us to give Sophie the greatest
>> possible chance of success."
>
> Great summary for an issue that I've seen come up several times. A
> couple of years back for example NASA evaluated Croquet for a project
> of theirs and decided against it for basically the same reasons: They
> needed people (other NASA scientists and engineers) who would build
> add-ons and extensions and requiring those to learn Squeak was
> perceived a hopeless exercise (and that isn't even mentioning the
> modularity issues Squeak has).
>
> When we faced the same issue again at Qwaq/Teleplace and this time we
> decided to "work around" it by providing the extension APIs in Python
> instead allowing direct access to Squeak. This has served us very well.
>
> This entirely line of arguments is one of the better reasons why
> "being popular" isn't such a bad thing :-)
>
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
>
>

>> Obviously recent discussions regarding to the development of squeak and
>> the "spin-offs" didn't help much. In one hand they project an image of a
>> fractured community (and managers hate this kind of thing) and in the
>> other it reinforces the image of "a beta stuff" (meaning something with
>> specs really open & morphing/mutating development
>> boundaries/implemantations) and managers hate this too...
>
> both images do reflect reality quite accurately, so there is not much
> we can do about it...
>
> Stef
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