The Future of Squeak

It seems the future stopped  early in 2007; surely we can improve upon http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2915 ?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: NBRM: Unconditional No BRanch Multiple

Perhaps that "Future of Squeak" page should be on squeak.org and
removed from the wiki altogether.

Because we all know the wiki is not updated so let's it serve in a way
compatible with how it naturally gets used:  as a documentation
archive, not "current news" and certainly not things about the
"future."

One exception is our current release notes -- it seems we've cared
enough to update the 4.5 page a few times -- how we're keeping track
of the issues important to us for the next release.

Beyond that, discussion about the future of Squeak is right here.

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 1:28 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
> It seems the future stopped  early in 2007; surely we can improve upon http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2915 ?
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Strange OpCodes: NBRM: Unconditional No BRanch Multiple
>
>
>

I guess my major point really is that the wiki pages are horribly out of date which at the least means probably wrong and misleading to any newcomers trying to find out about Squeak. I'm inclined to think that anything so out of date should probably be removed from view and at most preserved in some electronic aspic.

Many other pages on the squeak.org site are very out of date too and we collectively ought to try to do something about that. Again, I'd tend to go for the Cyberman approach (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGa37WgN3yY) The smart thing is probably to trim back to what we can actively support and then try to build more afreash.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
I am still waiting for the advent of the computer science groupie.

So, after years of nothing, Tim shows up with a complaint and a buzz-saw?   ;-)

The Wiki by its nature has many authors which gives it its "messy"
organic quality rather than the clear presentation of a single
individual.  Unless we want to establish an overseer it will always be
exactly what many community individuals make of it.

The true cyberman approach would be simply to run a job that
enumerates every page of the swiki and deletes any that are, say,
older than one year.

But I think there are plenty of opportunities to make it more
organized and presentable without needing to be overly aggressive via
the cyberman approach.  For example, MathMorphs are probably works in
some old image and possibly able to be brought forward so I'd hate to
see perfectly good documentation completely annihilated simply because
someone considered it "old and out of date".


On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 3:49 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with Tim.  

Keep in mind I only have time to suggest work not do it.  For those that get angry about that feel free to stop reading.

It would be great to start a new wiki, or make a new front page with links that are more current, or even mark old stuff as old.  Instead the more practical route is probably pruning and deleting out or updating content that provides little or no current value or stop pointing to it directly from squeak.org.  If we want to still point people to it at least the first page needs updating.  Any link off the front page should be current, updated or deleted.

All the best,

Ron Teitelbaum

On 15-04-2013, at 3:41 PM, Chris Muller <[hidden email]> wrote:

> So, after years of nothing, Tim shows up with a complaint and a buzz-saw?   ;-)


More of a set of pruning shears.

>
> The Wiki by its nature has many authors which gives it its "messy"
> organic quality rather than the clear presentation of a single
> individual.  Unless we want to establish an overseer it will always be
> exactly what many community individuals make of it.

Since there is no practical way to have an overseer for these things we have to at least occasionally take a look and see what sort of a tangle of weeds has grown up. It's a typical problem with common property; everyone thinks it's everyone else's problem to care for it. Stuff that is dead - such as non-existent links -can be removed completely. Horribly out of date stuff can be de-linked from the main pages and put into a storage ward for possible use in organ transplants.

There's nothing terrible with having some old and out of date pages around but I'd much prefer to see them not being linked to from the 'front door'. Thinking of which, a lot of content on the non-Wiki part of the site is out of date too, including the names of the SOB.

I did a few prunings this morning on the wiki but I can't edit the non-Wiki pages.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- Gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn't coming.

Tim Rowledge wrote:

> Since there is no practical way to have an overseer for these things we have
> to at least occasionally take a look and see what sort of a tangle of weeds
> has grown up. It's a typical problem with common property; everyone thinks
> it's everyone else's problem to care for it. Stuff that is dead - such as
> non-existent links -can be removed completely. Horribly out of date stuff can
> be de-linked from the main pages and put into a storage ward for possible
> use in organ transplants.

This was the issue that Andreas and I disagreed most of all - he wanted
to simply delete the swiki completely while I wanted something more like
what you are suggesting. I understood his viewpoint: he had Teleplace
clients doing searches like "squeak truetype fonts" and finding obsolete
advice that could have very nasty results if followed. His proposal,
would result in such searches turning up lots of new broken links, which
he felt was the lesser of two evils.

I don't like to have any information simply disappear from the web.
Specially since I do sometimes use old versions of stuff and need that
obsolete information. But I agree that people shouldn't stumble into it
without knowing that it is not current. This, by the way, is not just a
Squeak problem. Just try to seach for solutions to sound configuration
or packet forwarding issues in Linux, for example.

My proposal was to freeze the old swiki into static pages, adding a
large warning at the top of each one about how the page is now outdated.
We could have a new swiki started from scratch and linked to from the
front page and the rest of squeak.org. If the new swiki got a page with
the same information as one of the old ones, the warning in the latter
should include a link to the new version.

About a year ago I was forced to do something similar to my own swiki
since I had to move my site to a new server which doesn't run Squeak and
didn't allow me to use port 8080 (so I was unable to keep the old links
working). I did a very quick and dirty job, but it did show that my
original proposal was reasonable.

My fear about deleting the old swiki and starting a new one was that the
effort would peter out one third of the way (for example) and we would
simply be left with far less information available about Squeak than we
have now. Given that a common complaint about both Squeak and Smalltalk
in general is the perception that there is a lack of documentation
compared to other languages, I don't think this would be a good idea.

-- Jecel

On 4/16/13 2:13 AM, "Chris Cunningham" <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 3:41 PM, Chris Muller <[hidden email]> wrote:
<snip> 

...  For example, MathMorphs are probably works in
some old image and possibly able to be brought forward so I'd hate to
see perfectly good documentation completely annihilated simply because
someone considered it "old and out of date".

Interesting.  In early 2011, Edgar had MathMorphs working in his FunSqueak based on Squeak 4.2, so this is definitely doable.  So as documentation, it does have uses.

There are undoubtedly parts that aren't useful as well, at least to some of us.  For now.  Hmm. 

http://img541.imageshack.us/img541/7019/screenshot20130416at918.png
Here you see original Caniglia et al works still working in Squeak 4.5 updated today.

Edgar