Matthew,

By the right thing too soon, I think there are influential people who are not 
yet ready to allow Squeak to change.  I do not necessarily agree that Stef et 
al. have rekindled interest in Smalltalk so much as they have given many new 
hope for Squeak to realize its potential to be a clean fast and robust open 
source Smalltalk.

Bill




-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Matthew Fulmer
Sent: Sunday, March 01, 2009 11:12 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: {Spam?} Re: [Pharo-project] A point a.k.a excuse to you

On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 08:47:53PM -0500, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:
> My sense is that Matthew is doing the right thing, with the best of 
> intentions, but might be trying it too soon.  

I would appreciate it if you would expand on that. 

> Pharo is establishing a spirit of finding the common problem and solving it 
> such that we can all have what we want.

I believe you are correct, but not everybody sees Pharo that
way. Edgar and Keith in particular, sometimes see it as
non-appreciation of their work, which is similar in spirit, but
not as well managed. 

Others have more vague objections I don't yet understand.

> As Gandhi put it, "First they ignore you, then they ridicule
> you, then they fight you, then you win."  Some of those
> pressuring you have probably just moved on from ridicule.

Let me apologize on behalf of the squeak-dev community. Not all
of us feel so harshly toward you, but I did not speak up enough to
convince you of our appreciation. You deserve better, and I'm
sorry we did not deliver it. 

> Making Pharo the best it can be will be a win for everyone, even if some do 
> not see it that way at the time.

I plan to work with Pharo soon, probably once summer starts and
school is out, to get Keith's tools debugged and working in the
context of Pharo, especially Monticello 1.6 (My patches to MC1.5
to enable real atomic loading (= no more problems upgrading
Polymorph), and Bob (the automated image builder and regression
tester). 

I know this is deep stuff, but I believe an automated image
builder will have several advantages, both for you, as Pharo
developers, and for me, as an enthusiast for cross-squeak
compatibility:
- making releases is faster
- Regression bugs are caught faster
- the scripts serve as poor-man's code sharing between squeak
  distributions until we have real package-level sharing of core
  code between core

You may or may not know, but I am a core Cobalt developer, and I
hope to bring Pharo and Cobalt much closer together. These two
projects are hosting many core changes to the image, with little
regard to backward compatibility. We may even get tweak to the
level where it is a compelling replacement for Morphic, and I
want Pharo to benefit from that if it does indeed happen. Too
many improvements to Squeak happen in the dark (Newspeak,
Spoon), and we can ill afford to estrange the truly open
projects from each other (Pharo and Cobalt, IMO). 

> Thanks for doing this!

Yes, thank you Stef and Marcus for rekindling the passion for
Smalltalk in many people. With luck, squeak.org may be a free,
open, and useful product again. Too long has it been stuck, with
nobody to bring it forward. Pharo has done much to re-awaken the
love of smalltalk in many people, and that, if nothing else, is
a gift beyond measure. As Squeak.org release team leader, you
have my goodwill and my support. I will do what I can to spread
the gifts of your efforts to the rest of squeak, and bring their
efforts to you.

-- 
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/

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