[squeak-dev] The future of Squeak & Pharo (was Re: [Pharo-project] [ANN] Pharo MIT license clean)

Hi all!

Matthew Fulmer wrote:
> Awesome job guys. The volume of improvements Pharo has over
> Squeak really makes me wonder if the latter has any real
> relevance anymore.

Yes, it is quite an interesting situation IMHO, and one that most of us
could foresee too I think.

NOTE: Read the following with a nice bucket of love, ok? I don't intend
to make anyone upset. :) And sorry for the long post.

On one hand I really appreciate the Pharo project - lots of good people
doing lots of good progress etc. It seems to be doing simply great.

On the other hand the "negative" effect I can see is the "drain" it has
caused (I think) from squeak.org/squeak-dev. In other words, squeak.org
has lost a lot of momentum, and of course not only due to the birth of
Pharo I should add. And in many ways Pharo may also be the "rescue" to
squeak.org. God knows we have been trying to find "our way" lately and
with... less impressive results. :)

So... how will the future evolve? Does the Squeak community (in the
large sense) have anything to gain from keeping both the squeak.org and
the pharo fork "alive"?

I presume we have at least the following three scenarios:

1. Continue as now and take no specific action. This will probably lead
to Squeak.org going weaker and Pharo stronger by the day. Developers
will want to be where the "action" is. Soon squeak.org turns irrelevant
and dies a slow death.

2. Take some decisive action and "merge" the two in some *smart* way
beneficial to both. Impossible? I hope not.

3. Just kill off squeak.org. A mercy kill :). Then people could move
over to Pharo without having to think about it - there is no other "Squeak".

Eh, well, my analysis is probably full of silly holes here. Looking at
the above, 1 and 3 feels less nice. So how could a "merge" look that
would be attractive to *both* camps? I call the theoretical merged
project Phreak below (but I am not proposing name changes etc, but I
need a name to use in the text).

Pharo characteristics:

- A small "benevolent dictator" board. Lots of action, less talk.
- Has a very clear stated "direction".
- Has a website using CMSBox.
- Uses Google code for issue tracker and wiki.
- Has Mailman mailinglists and downloads at gforge.inria.fr (I think)

Squeak.org org characteristics:

- Has an elected SOB, an election process and a Team model. The jury is
still out I think, we seem to have lots of trouble "getting shit done".
- Has very little stated "direction" at the moment.
- Has a website using Swazoo.
- Uses Mantis, Swiki, file archive and Mailman on a community paid
Hetzner server.

Now... why would Squeak.org want to merge with Pharo?

Pros: Get momentum back. 1 + 1 = 2. A revitalization. Very important!

Cons: The SOB & Team model would probably have to be dropped. The work
made since Pharo forked may or may not be a "lost cause", that depends
on if Phreak is interested in utilizing that work. Other cons?

...and Pharo?

Pros: An influx of developers. A much stronger position as Phreak would
be Squeak + Pharo. No "compatibility" to worry about, Squeak is out of
the picture.

Cons: Some people in Pharo may perceive such a merge as dangerous since
they might be afraid that certain aspects of Squeak.org (that Pharo was
created in order to escape from) is coming back "knocking on the door".

I personally don't think there is such a danger if Phreak simply adopts
the simple organisation of Pharo (with board and all) BUT... since it
would make the Pharo community much *larger* the effects of that growth
need to be taken into account. But Pharo should not fear growth, because
that would be an odd position.

How could a merge be done practically? I really don't know :). And I
must stop typing now, this post is waaaaay to long anyway and I have
probably stepped on too many toes already.

regards, Göran

2009/6/28 Göran Krampe <[hidden email]>:
Hello Goran.
You are definitely didn't stepped on any of my toes/toys. And i would
certainly sacrifice my SOB membership (if this is a sacrifice), to see
things moving & progressing as fast as they do in Pharo.
As many others, i eagier to see the squeak/pharo/phreak shining - make
it cool & modern software. The rest of things is barely bothering me.

What i like in Pharo, that they make decisions on strictly technical
basis - no politics. If code is good - it candidate to be included. If
code stinks - its a candidate to be excluded. Simple concept :)

For anyone, interested in my opinion:
  i would put a huge +1 for a merge on a Pharoer's conditions.

> regards, Göran
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pharo-project mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
>



--
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.

On Sat, 2009-06-27 at 23:44 +0200, Göran Krampe wrote:
>
>

I am new here and not really qualified to comment on this issue. Please
take my input as having good intentions. Specifically, I do not want to
start a flame war over the pros and cons of various projects.

There is much to learn from the history of the BSD community.
(Disclaimer: I am a huge fan of FreeBSD.) The FreeBSD project began with
the goal of creating an open-source OS for Intel i386 hardware that was
as faithful as possible to BSD Unix. In time the developers were going
in three directions. One group wanted high performance, a second wanted
portability to every possible platform, and a third wanted high
reliability and security. There were also the usual personality
conflicts and differing opinions on how to manage the project.
Eventually it forked, twice, giving us FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.
Each has its own personality, its own strengths. The good news is they
cross-pollinate each other.

As for Squeak, I have been working on my Open Slate concept for almost
ten years and one of the biggest obstacles I have encountered is a
suitable software environment. I'll spare you the explanation, my point
being that Squeak is the best thing I have found. Alan Kay knew what he
was doing.

It looks to me like Pharo is a Smalltalk for building grown-up apps.
Very much like the Smalltalk I began with, which produced apps with the
look and feel of the host Microsoft Windows. I think there is a need for
that. I take it Pharo is new, and as such it has been luring developers
away from Squeak. The potential for good in this outweighs whatever the
negative consequences may be, because, like the BSDs, the Squeak
developers can always pull in what they like from Pharo.

Do not confuse a fork with a divorce. Think of it as mitosis. The more
the merrier.

I believe that the impact of Squeak on education has yet to be realized.
The necessary hardware -- the visionary Dynabook -- is just appearing.
It will be years before there are enough skilled teachers for the
critical mass required for the paradigm shift to occur. And there is the
culture change, so difficult in a field as institutionalized as modern
education. What we have been seeing are the Smalltalk explorers and
trail blazers, the pioneers to whom we will someday owe an enormous debt
of gratitude.

I am in no position to recommend anything here, but I will just the
same. Please forgive me. I recommend that Squeak not be killed off, or
merged. Let the fork live on.

I cannot close without saying that "Phreak" would be a very bad name :-)

--
Gary Dunn, Honolulu
[hidden email]
http://openslate.net/
http://e9erust.blogspot.com/
Sent from Slate001

Hi!

(still cross posting, hope you don't mind)

Gary Dunn wrote:
> I am new here and not really qualified to comment on this issue. Please
> take my input as having good intentions. Specifically, I do not want to
> start a flame war over the pros and cons of various projects.

Nah, we don't do flame wars in the Squeak community. Well, not bad ones
at least :)

Yeah, that would be a positive future. And I have in fact earlier
strongly advocated the fact that we need to "live with forks" because we
already have several of them (like Croquet, OLPC etc).

But see below...

[SNIP]
> It looks to me like Pharo is a Smalltalk for building grown-up apps.
> Very much like the Smalltalk I began with, which produced apps with the
> look and feel of the host Microsoft Windows. I think there is a need for
> that. I take it Pharo is new, and as such it has been luring developers
> away from Squeak. The potential for good in this outweighs whatever the
> negative consequences may be, because, like the BSDs, the Squeak
> developers can always pull in what they like from Pharo.

In a "perfect world", yes. I even started the DeltaStreams project with
these cross pollination scenarios in my head.

> Do not confuse a fork with a divorce. Think of it as mitosis. The more
> the merrier.

Yes, that is also the way I have argued about it. See:

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-August/119471.html

> I believe that the impact of Squeak on education has yet to be realized.
> The necessary hardware -- the visionary Dynabook -- is just appearing.
> It will be years before there are enough skilled teachers for the
> critical mass required for the paradigm shift to occur. And there is the
> culture change, so difficult in a field as institutionalized as modern
> education. What we have been seeing are the Smalltalk explorers and
> trail blazers, the pioneers to whom we will someday owe an enormous debt
> of gratitude.

Possibly true, but Smalltalk, Squeak, Etoys and even Croquet have been
around for quite some time now - and we haven't seen any real explosion
yet. Croquet was meant to "explode" but hasn't. So I am not holding my
breath for "the day Squeak gets popular" :)

> I am in no position to recommend anything here, but I will just the
> same. Please forgive me. I recommend that Squeak not be killed off, or
> merged. Let the fork live on.

Nothing to forgive, I want to hear lots of opinions in order for me to
personally form an opinion about the idea. The "view" you present above
is a positive one of a forked world. The reality can be harsher:

Take XFree86 vs XOrg for example. The history there is complicated but
the fact remains - XOrg started, added lots of "cool features" quickly
while XFree86 stood still, then when the developers started heavily
voting with their feet the distros also switched and XFree86 was dead
before it even hit the floor.

There are mainly two aspects here that tells me that the above "bad
future of XFree86" is more likely to happen than the "good future of
Open/Net/FreeBSD":

- Pharo may "sound" like it has a different agenda than Squeak.org but
IMO the large majority of Squeak.org developers share the Pharo agenda.
Thus the differentiation is not there. Most people will just pick the
one with the most momentum, and that is Pharo.

- Squeak.org is standing still. Sure, there are things being done by
some people, no doubt about that. But perception is *everything* and
from the outside it seems to be standing still. Even the squeak-dev list
is quieting down and that is a bad sign.


So although I share your basic view of cross pollinating forks being a
"Good Thing" and something we should embrace (see OLPC, Squeakland,
Croquet etc etc) such forks need to have a specific goal.

IMHO Pharo is not such a fork, Pharo is still very much "generic" as is
Squeak.org. Pharo is more like "Squeak.org going agile" or "Smalltalk,
with less talk" :). And thus it resembles XOrg much, much more than OpenBSD.

> I cannot close without saying that "Phreak" would be a very bad name :-)

Again, I wasn't even advocating a name change - although a name change
may be a good thing if we would merge. Also, I hate to say it, but
"Pharo" sucks pretty bad too I think, and you guys STILL have attracted
lots of developers :) :)

Oh, and a final note:

But what if Squeak.org is abandoned and everyone moves to Pharo, what is
so bad about letting that happen? It is NOT bad. But I think we could do
it in a smoother way and actually turn this into something *positive*.
The merge could be turned into a real BOOST to Squeak/Pharo.

regards, Göran

>> Yes, it is quite an interesting situation IMHO, and one that most  
>> of us
> could foresee too I think.
>
> NOTE: Read the following with a nice bucket of love, ok?

sure :)

I think that squeak has a momentum and should naturally continue to  
exist.

> I presume we have at least the following three scenarios:
>
> 1. Continue as now and take no specific action. This will probably  
> lead
> to Squeak.org going weaker and Pharo stronger by the day. Developers
> will want to be where the "action" is. Soon squeak.org turns  
> irrelevant
> and dies a slow death.

Not necessarily. It depends what squeakers want to achieve.
It is not clear to me.


> 2. Take some decisive action and "merge" the two in some *smart* way
> beneficial to both. Impossible? I hope not.

I do not know. We left for specific reasons and I do not see how
they could be solved. Then the magic: "develop for both" does not work  
in general
because software is complex. too complex.

> 3. Just kill off squeak.org. A mercy kill :). Then people could move
> over to Pharo without having to think about it - there is no other  
> "Squeak".

I do not think that this is wise. Now people should think why and what  
they are doing.
So far pharo is not taking the multimedia space: so if squeakers want  
to continue
or even better build (or rebuild) it:
Imagine some great libraries and scenario that focus on delivering  
high-quality
multimedia experiences. Then this would be cool. May be squeak would  
run on top
of pharo :)))))

> Eh, well, my analysis is probably full of silly holes here. Looking at
> the above, 1 and 3 feels less nice. So how could a "merge" look that
> would be attractive to *both* camps?

which camps? :)


I'm not that convinced.
Let us see that if Squeak would be really active and share common  
interest
for cleaning and delivering good abstractions for multimedia and other
you could see Squeak/phreak based on pharo and this could be cool.
Now so far I see not that much progress.

me neither.

> And I
> must stop typing now, this post is waaaaay to long anyway and I have
> probably stepped on too many toes already.

Not really.

>
> regards, Göran
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pharo-project mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project

Igor I think that this is too early.
Let us deliver something first and see.
I want to see what we can really do.
Can we create a community of doers?
Can we create wealth and a cool community?
Then some people can see how we can merge and if this makes sense

Stef

Göran Krampe wrote:
This is the key issue here.

At least Pharo has an agenda. Squeak needs an agenda badly. Something
along the lines of the old "Where is Squeak headed" from Dan. Without
that, Squeak can't advance in any direction at all. People choosing a
Smalltalk for their projects can not know what to expect. Forks can not
know if they are needed or not.

Most forks have clearly defined objectives. Etoys, Croquet, Cuis do have
them. The objectives for Pharo are broader, and less defined. But Pharo
guys know where they are going, and they have some developer time and
organization to advance.

Squeak has nothing of this.

The Squeak community needs to define objectives and an agenda for
Squeak, or decide that we don't have them, and that the Squeak branch
will not be developed further.

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich

Juan Vuletich wrote: Yes it has
> The Squeak community needs to define objectives and an agenda for Squeak,
We have, and we have had our adgenda longer than pharo has had theirs.
The irony being that having defined an agenda for moving forward in an
inclusive manner, the pharo team forked!
> or decide that we don't have them, and that the Squeak branch will not
> be developed further.
>
> Cheers,
> Juan Vuletich
There is so much FUD in the past couple of emails I cant even summon the
energy to reply to them

Keith

Keith Hodges wrote:
Squeak doesn't have a set of objectives and an agenda that is meaningful
for developers. And it hasn't had it for a long time. Pharo is new. But
Tweak, Croquet and Etoys forked looong time ago. Now you also have Pharo
and Cuis. Most developers are contributing to forks, and we only send
our stuff for Squeak as a side-effect.

I can't understand how it isn't obvious for everybody that something is
going really wrong with our community, our leadership, our decision
making and our release procedure.

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich

Hi guys!

Keith Hodges wrote:
> Juan Vuletich wrote:
>> Most forks have clearly defined objectives. Etoys, Croquet, Cuis do
>> have them. The objectives for Pharo are broader, and less defined. But
>> Pharo guys know where they are going, and they have some developer
>> time and organization to advance.
>>
>> Squeak has nothing of this.
>
> Yes it has

Mmmm, ok, care to elaborate a bit? Because I am slightly with Juan here
- I don't think we have "clearly defined objectives". We *do* have some
developer time and organization, yes.

>> The Squeak community needs to define objectives and an agenda for Squeak,
> We have, and we have had our adgenda longer than pharo has had theirs.
> The irony being that having defined an agenda for moving forward in an
> inclusive manner, the pharo team forked!

Yeah, but please - don't turn this into an argument of "we" and "them".
I don't want a heated flame war - I want a nice discussion about the future.

>> or decide that we don't have them, and that the Squeak branch will not
>> be developed further.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Juan Vuletich
> There is so much FUD in the past couple of emails I cant even summon the
> energy to reply to them

Then I urge you as a friend - to please do reply. Because all this FUD
is not apparent to me at least.

One simple test to show you what I mean:

- Surf to squeak.org. Try to find a Roadmap or an explanation about the
next release or where to get it. I can't find any of this. No, wait - if
I *search* for the word "roadmap" I actually find this:

http://www.squeak.org/Community/Roadmap/

But I can't see it in the TOC! Anyway, it is empty for 3.11.

All these things are VERY important. If the FRONT page explained what
the latest release is (3.10.2) and its changes since 3.10  AND we had a
good description of coming release - then life would be so much simpler.

Sorry if I am too sounding like a FUDer - it is not my intention.

regards, Göran

My point of view:

Pharo people weren't happy with the way Squeak was developed, so they
started their own project and now its development goes well: good for
them. It seems like a lot of people are actually interested and working
in Pharo; again: good for them.

Now I do like Squeak better, so I stayed here (beside, it would be a
hell of a work to port my code to Pharo, with all the "cleaning up" that
happened there). Why should I even consider letting Squeak die, or
merging it into Pharo ? Of course cross-pollination between the two
project is something worth reaching for, but I can't see how Squeak
doing harakiri is an adequate response to this challenge.

Squeak development slowed down quite a bit. So what ? That's something
we can discuss here in squeak-dev. No urge to surrender to Pharo IMHO.


Stef

2009/6/28 Göran Krampe <[hidden email]>:
> Possibly true, but Smalltalk, Squeak, Etoys and even Croquet have been
> around for quite some time now - and we haven't seen any real explosion yet.
> Croquet was meant to "explode" but hasn't. So I am not holding my breath for
> "the day Squeak gets popular" :)

Sometimes being popular means doing normal things. Smalltalk is an
unusual programming language (in the sense of mainstream) with an
overly eccentric environment in Squeak. Then there are Croquet, Etoys,
and so on. It's hardly a break through if it's only "more" eccentric
than eccentric. Don't you think?

The look-and-feel is designed for children. It's colourful, joyful, it
bleeps and blink. How many professional developers are children? How
many children are on this list? Enough with that already! Can we have
a normal look-and-feel? A professional look-and-feel. =)

Squeak is stuck in some time warp, where the surrounding world is on
stand still. It should however consider that we are living in 2009 and
have needs of 2009. We need a different usability, developer tools and
we have different goals. For example, Squeak hardly support the
requirements of my distributors, which makes it overly challenging for
me to consider Squeak as our platform of development.

Squeak doesn't need a killer app. It needs to be spruced up and put
back on track. Honey moon is over, it's time to get real.

Regards,
Ian.

--
http://mecenia.blogspot.com/

Hi!

Stéphane Rollandin wrote:
> My point of view:
>
> Pharo people weren't happy with the way Squeak was developed, so they
> started their own project and now its development goes well: good for
> them. It seems like a lot of people are actually interested and working
> in Pharo; again: good for them.

"Them" is the wrong word. It is rather "a lot of us". And "good for us".

> Now I do like Squeak better, so I stayed here (beside, it would be a
> hell of a work to port my code to Pharo, with all the "cleaning up" that
> happened there).

There is always work in porting over to new versions of Squeak. If we
cross pollinate then you will end up facing the exact same issue. And
also, you can always "lag" a release or two - quite common for larger
projects.

> Why should I even consider letting Squeak die, or
> merging it into Pharo?

Because if the "trend" I am perceiving (I may be wrong) continues then
there will be very few of us left working on the Squeak 3.10 lineage
under the Squeak.org flag. And the fewer there are the more likely they
will jump over too.

 > Of course cross-pollination between the two
> project is something worth reaching for, but I can't see how Squeak
> doing harakiri is an adequate response to this challenge.

Well, if you consider a merge to be harakiri - then I agree it sounds
frightening :)

> Squeak development slowed down quite a bit. So what ? That's something
> we can discuss here in squeak-dev. No urge to surrender to Pharo IMHO.

IMHO this kind of phrasing and thinking - "urge to surrender" etc, is
the wrong way of looking at it. It is not some kind of war!

Remember that before Pharo was started all those developers were working
on Squeak. We are ALL Squeakers. We ALL want Squeak in the large sense
to move on and improve. We all want a good solid base to do our work in,
and a nice community to share. We all want fast turnaround on bug fixes
and contributions etc.

I just want us to do the *smart* thing here.

regards, Göran

> Squeak doesn't need a killer app. It needs to be spruced up and put
> back on track. Honey moon is over, it's time to get real.

I would suggest you switch to Pharo: it's there exactly to fit your
expectations. Then you can let Squeak live its life, be it overly
eccentric.

Stef

> Well, if you consider a merge to be harakiri - then I agree it sounds
> frightening :)

If my work can not be ported after the merge, it is harakiri indeed (at
least for me).

Stef

2009/6/28 Stéphane Rollandin <[hidden email]>:
>> Squeak doesn't need a killer app. It needs to be spruced up and put
>> back on track. Honey moon is over, it's time to get real.
>
> I would suggest you switch to Pharo: it's there exactly to fit your
> expectations. Then you can let Squeak live its life, be it overly eccentric.

Mince! On me m'attire avec de belles promesses! Pour ensuite me
dérober et me laisser seul dans le noir... =P

That was however a great piece of advertisement. he he he

Ian.

--
http://mecenia.blogspot.com/

Hi Stef,

Stéphane Rollandin wrote:
Ok. So the Squeak objective for you might be something like: "Evolve
mildly the current Squeak functionality. Fix bugs. Keep APIs
compatibility.". I'm ok with such mission. It would mean that Pharo and
Squeak should not merge. It also means Cuis and Squeak should not merge.
The problem is not having it clearly stated.

> Squeak development slowed down quite a bit. So what ? That's something
> we can discuss here in squeak-dev. No urge to surrender to Pharo IMHO.
>
>
> Stef

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich

Hi!

Ian Trudel wrote:
Not sure what you mean there.

> The look-and-feel is designed for children. It's colourful, joyful, it
> bleeps and blink. How many professional developers are children? How
> many children are on this list? Enough with that already! Can we have
> a normal look-and-feel? A professional look-and-feel. =)

Personally I like the colors. I also don't equal "normal" with
"professional". But such is taste!

> Squeak is stuck in some time warp, where the surrounding world is on
> stand still. It should however consider that we are living in 2009 and
> have needs of 2009. We need a different usability, developer tools and
> we have different goals.

Note that talking about what we "need" and what other people "want" is
not really that fruitful. We get what we *do*, or in other words - if
someone feels it is important enough to spend time on it - it will get
done. Noone works on something because *someone else* told him to.

 > For example, Squeak hardly support the
> requirements of my distributors, which makes it overly challenging for
> me to consider Squeak as our platform of development.

Elaborate?

> Squeak doesn't need a killer app. It needs to be spruced up and put
> back on track. Honey moon is over, it's time to get real.

Hehe, I really don't agree. :)

Squeak *is* real. We already have our killer app (Seaside). We do need
to clean shit up though (and I am not talking about UI primarily) and
get the improvement process working. Currently Squeak.org is getting
smashed (again, I don't have hard numbers, but I think I am right) by
Pharo when it comes to hard, concrete, nitty gritt work getting done.

regards, Göran

Stéphane Rollandin wrote:
>
>> Well, if you consider a merge to be harakiri - then I agree it sounds
>> frightening :)
>
> If my work can not be ported after the merge, it is harakiri indeed (at
> least for me).

Why would it not portable? Are you using features that are totally
unavailable in Pharo?

regards, Göran

>>>>> "Stéphane" == Stéphane Rollandin <[hidden email]> writes:

Stéphane> I would suggest you switch to Pharo: it's there exactly to fit your
Stéphane> expectations. Then you can let Squeak live its life, be it overly eccentric.

For some, what I'm about to say is obvious.  But for others, this might be a
deal killer.

Once Squeak core is included as part of the SFC, it will be a lot easier for a
business to base its work on Squeak.  If there's a question of code heritage,
the SFLC will assist to provide "we stand together" support.

For Etoys, this has already happened, in that VPRI is willing to put *its*
legal resources behind the current code base.

I know Pharo has just announced "mit license for everything", but there's
no organization with other-than-volunteer resources that can certify that.

And given that Pharo is derived from the same original apple-licensed
code that had troubled Etoys and now taints Squeak core (until the 4.0
effort is complete), I see this as a problem.

For me, that means I cannot recommend Pharo for business development.

What I would *like* to see, and am working towards as a member of the
Squeak Leadership Team is:

(a) squeak core gets clean MIT license, and joins SFC
(b) Pharo's license-known updates get rewritten to apply to squeak core

This would make something that is equivalent to Pharo, but with a clean
license history.

In essence, I'd like to bring Pharo "back into the fold", because there *are*
advantages to having a clean license history that *is* supported by someone's
paid lawyers, just as there are advantages to have "modernized" the legacy
Squeak look-and-feel.

I know this will mean some work to unruffle some feathers and make things work
again for everyone.  But I want that to happen.

--
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