[squeak-dev] Renaming "Squeak"

100% agree.
I think nobody choose a language only for its cool name.
Programmers ever want better tools to build their applications.

Cheers,

Francisco

El mar, 04-03-2008 a las 18:46 -0600, Ken Causey escribió:
> +1
>
> Ken
>
> P.S. How about spending time writing some useful code instead?

Really? how mach serious is squeak than java....(where from come the cafe).

       
In addition, the mouse and squeak reference a lot of qualities that
comparatively put to squeak better than their competitors in the
mainstream (the elephants).
We are versatile, we adapt easily to the environment, well might spend
hours writing about the comparison between elephants and mouses.

For this reason and for everything that comes earlier writing that, I
think that we must preserve our identity.

The access to the business environment don't be in the name,  but it
is in the results, professionalism and above all love to be seen as a
product in Squeak.

As long as we have in mind that Squeak is not only a laboratory
experiment, but a reality that has the potential to improve software
development at the enterprise level and act consciousness. Squeak will
be take places in the companies.

And finally, if someone decides to use the language for the name .....
ummm, better not talk about this person.

cheers
Diogenes

PD: Sorry for my "google" english.

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 10:37 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:

Alan,

Agreed.  The name is not nearly so important as the fundamentals of a
solid Smalltalk system.  Focusing on the latter serves everyone: the
children for whom all this was started; the adults who will set them up
with something they can use; and other developers wanting to work in
Smalltalk.

If we do create a ViewPoints Smalltalk, or whatever it gets named, then
we should do it right.  Fix the gratuitous incompatibilities with other
dialects, clean up the look and (far more important) the feel of the
GUI, and arrange for the toys and the experiments to be built on top of
vs. into the core language and environment.  However, that is good
advice whether the names changes or not.

Bill




====================================
Alan Lovejoy <squeak-dev.sourcery@...> wrote:

Squeak is not the most professional-sounding name that could have been
chosen. One very important purpose of a name is marketing, and the
name "Squeak" doesn't do that very well in a few rather important
markets. Of course, if you're marketing to children (and those who
educate them,) then Squeak is not at all a bad name.

But that's all water under the bridge at this point. Changing the
name only, in the absence of any other substantive changes, would at
best be ignored as a shameless (and not well-motivated) marketing
ploy. At worst, it would be seen as an act of desperation.

Change Squeak so that it deserves a new name. Then the new name will
be perceived as having been earned, and so will serve as an effective
marketing tool to advertise the new, improved "Open Source Smalltalk."

--Alan

Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: [hidden email]
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029

Gratuitous incompatibilities? As somebody who's only every used Squeak, what are they?

Gulik.


--
http://people.squeakfoundation.org/person/mikevdg
http://gulik.pbwiki.com/

Underscore for assignment!

Brace notation for dynamic arrays!

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 2:02 PM, Michael van der Gulik <[hidden email]> wrote:

See also guidelines for Seaside, which cares about cross-dialect portability:
http://www.seaside.st/community/conventions


On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 2:23 PM, David Mitchell <[hidden email]> wrote:

> a minimal image that is used as a base
> or a template to create other projects that have different names.

Good luck. :-(

Paolo

Gulik.

--
http://people.squeakfoundation.org/person/mikevdg
http://gulik.pbwiki.com/

Then when we have a Squeak kernel image reasonably stripped, call it
Squeak--.

And don't you forget less is more (apologies to James, Travis, etc.. for
obvious pillage of VW slogan).

Nicolas

David Zmick a écrit :
> the artist formerly know as prince lol..
>
> I agree with Mr. Rowledge, other programming languages have considerable
> strange names(see http://microsoft.toddverbeek.com/lang.html), and they
> are very successfully,
> I especially like the name C++ because of the ++ "joke" it has in it.
>
> I personally feel that squeak should stay called squeak!
>

>>>>> "David" == David Mitchell <[hidden email]> writes:

David> Underscore for assignment!

On this point, you could argue that it's the *other* smalltalks that have
chosen to be gratuitously incompatible, not Squeak, since this choice derives
all the way back from the mothership, Smalltalk80.

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[hidden email]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!

Squeak is a Smalltalk.....all of us understand the same by Smalltalk?
Isn't a language......is a lot more..........and also has a language
:)

Focusing in products, platforms, etc (I think) is a
mistake........Smalltalk deserve a bit more of ambition.


2008/3/5, Michael van der Gulik <[hidden email]>:

"Randal L. Schwartz" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...
>>>>>> "David" == David Mitchell <[hidden email]> writes:
>
> David> Underscore for assignment!
>
> On this point, you could argue that it's the *other* smalltalks that have
> chosen to be gratuitously incompatible, not Squeak, since this choice
> derives
> all the way back from the mothership, Smalltalk80.

True.
But then you could argue that Squeak has chosen to be deviously incompatible
by replacing the left arrow with an underscore, and yet pretending that no
change has been made.

Which is the greater sin, to make a change, and make the change obvious; or
to make a change, and attempt to mask the fact that it has happened?

These assignment discussions are most amusing, and I am sure will remain so
for many years to come ;)

Cheers,
Andy

> See also guidelines for Seaside, which cares about cross-dialect portability:
>  http://www.seaside.st/community/conventions

Many of these guidelines are encoded in automatic Lint-Tests:

     http://source.lukas-renggli.ch/slime

Lukas

--
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch

Andrew Tween wrote:
> These assignment discussions are most amusing, and I am sure will remain so
> for many years to come ;)

Since you enjoy them, I will add a few comments. The change from left
arrow to underscore was done when moving from the draft ASCII standard
(1963) to the final one (1968). Unfortunately even in the early 1980s
there was still a lot of equipment being sold compatible with the draft
version. This was particularly true on anything from DEC or Xerox. So it
was natural that Smalltalk-80's notion of ASCII matched Xerox's.

When Digitalk released their first product in 1985 they introduced the
ideas of ":=" for assignment. Though the PC did have a left arrow
character, it used the exact same code as ESC and that would have caused
a lot of confusion. In addition they were trying really hard to sell to
Pascal programmers (C was not yet as popular at that time) with nearly
all examples in their very nice manual including the Pascal version
beside the Smalltalk one. Given the changes they had made they decided
to call their product "Methods". By their second product they had
cleared things up with Xerox and so it was caleld "Smalltalk V". This
one was graphical and could have used anything they wanted for
assignment, but they kept the ":=" for compatibility with their previous
product.

Of course, there is nothing wrong in letting stuff from Pascal (or C)
creep into Smalltalk. The colon before block argument names, for
example, came unchanged from Logo. But neither do I mind being
different.

-- Jecel

David,

You nailed the underscore, though I can largely avoid that one; still,
it is IMHO at best unfortunate.  It also appears to be increasingly
elective given unicode support and

   http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Developer_FAQs 

IMHO, we should find out how they did it, and emulate them.  I have
also thought about grabbing Croquet and just dumping the 3D features.
Perhaps that should be part of the 4.0 release plan?

The brace notation does not really bother me - I just don't like to see
it used :)   Humor aside, it is not a big deal to me, as I can (and do)
simply ignore it.  The underscore stings because I want to bring code to
Squeak.  The existing patch to allow $_ in all but the first slot in
selectors does most of what I need, but it seems an incompatibility that
should be fixed.

Another thing that really bothers me is the silent trucation of #next:.
 If

   'hello' readStream next:200.

does not signal an error, why does

   'hello' at:200

complain?  Of course, I'm not asking for bounds errors to be silent,
but I am lobbying for #next, #next:, etc. to grumble per VW and Dolphin
behavior.  FWIW, I have made a few tweaks to Nile along those lines.
What if truncation is appropriate?  #nextOrNil, #nextIfNone:,
#nextAvailable: can handle those situations, only with explicit
permission/instructions from the programmer.  I get a lot of data from
stream-like sources, and in many situations prefer to get my bad news
early, not after some goofy side effect causes a problem that
(hopefully) gets noticed before it causes harm.

Bill




===============================
"David Mitchell" <david.mitchell@...>

Underscore for assignment!

Brace notation for dynamic arrays!




Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: [hidden email]
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029

Hi,
"Jecel Assumpcao Jr" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:48150.8115343333$[hidden email]...
Thanks, the history is interesting.
I don't mind being different either. In fact, tomorrow morning, I am going
to trade in my Ford Focus for a Ford Model T because the brake pedal should
definitely be on the right hand side and I can't understand why they changed
it.
 :)

>
> -- Jecel
>
>

Bill Schwab wrote:
> You nailed the underscore, though I can largely avoid that one; still,
> it is IMHO at best unfortunate.  It also appears to be increasingly
> elective given unicode support and
>
>    http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Developer_FAQs 
>
> IMHO, we should find out how they did it, and emulate them.

If by "how they did it" you mean how we got rid of the underscore then
the answer is: Just. Do. It. All the tools are out there, there is
FixUnderscores package by Bert which you can use to convert the entire
image, then all you need is to make the compiler treat the underscore as
an undefined character, and off you go. Simple.

> I have
> also thought about grabbing Croquet and just dumping the 3D features.

The Croquet release comes with a "Homebase.image" which is the base
image that Croquet was built upon. It's in the deployment directory for
people who would like to set up custom Croquet images that may include
more or less of the stuff in the release (the Qwaq product images are
derived from it, too). It is effectively 3.8 plus some Croquet specific
modifications.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

On Wednesday 05 March 2008 1:54:34 am Michael van der Gulik wrote:
> I've thought about this too. "Squeak" is a name that's hard to take
> seriously, and I for one would be less inclined to advertise that any
> product I make is based on "Squeak". However, there's a large investment in
> the name - URLs, source code, public awareness,  etc.  The name is unlikely
> to change.
I wasn't thinking of rebranding an existing project when I proposed a new
name. Seriously, Squeak has fallen behind times and that is not good for an
innovative research platform. Both Smalltalk-80 and Squeak (1995) stood out
from the rest because they were years ahead of the rest and brought in many
innovative ways of controlling a computer (that we all take for granted now).
Today, Squeak struggles to handle multilingual text, scalable vector
graphics, multicore, 64-bit space, flash memory - features commonly available
in other programming environments. Research initiatives are split amongst
multiple projects like Fonc (VPRI), Croquet, Etoys (OLPC) etc. Whatever
project emerges out of Squeak should act as a core platform for inventing new
and efficient methods of programming.

The XO hardware shows what can happen in a couple of years if a handful of
people put their minds together to build a new platform. The software stack
on XO shows us that we are still a long way off in knowing how to program
such a system efficiently :-(.

One of the tasks for the new board will to be figure out a way to converge
disparate efforts, individual and commercial, into a single project; to get
all the wood behind one arrow. It would be far easier to do this under a new
name than to do it under "Squeak".

Choose any name except Squawk :-).

Subbu

>      > a minimal image that is used as a base
>      > or a template to create other projects that have different names.
>
>     Good luck. :-(
>
>
>
> Squeak already is used as a base for other projects! It's a platform,
> not an end product.

Good luck convincing people that a web browser does not belong in the
base image.

Paolo

Germán Arduino wrote:
> Squeak is a Smalltalk.....all of us understand the same by Smalltalk?

No, I don't think I do.

> Isn't a language......is a lot more..........and also has a language

Smalltalk is a language and should be (but isn't because of dialect
incompatibilities) a class library.  Everything else is not Smalltalk,
it is "the Smalltalk environment" which you are free to use or not to use.

Heck, not even the image is Smalltalk -- it's just an implementation detail.

I think this "I wanna change the world" attitude is what has kept
Smalltalk back in the last 10 years, compared to the more pragmatic view
of, say, the Python and Ruby communities.

Paolo