Norbert, There were many reasons to fork from Squeak, and the improvements in Pharo would not have been possible any other way. I share your frustration at the lack of compatibility between dialects. Necessity being the mother of invention (and in this case the motiviation for same), I have started chipping away at the problem between Dolphin and Pharo. So far, it is little more than a collection of facades and helper methods that should reduce the hassles of getting my Dolphin code to run on Pharo. When that is all that is required, I think we should strive to make such layers available. Being different merely for its own sake buys us little.
Bill -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Norbert Hartl Sent: Sunday, June 21, 2009 5:27 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Making GUI'S On Sat, 2009-06-20 at 21:46 +0200, Stéphane Ducasse wrote: > + 100000000 :) > > I want to invent a reasonable future :) > Your (Marcus and yours) mails sound a bit strange to me. Please let us not do this separation between academia and industria again. I don't think there is any option but to try to have both: stability and improvements. There should be a core that is as common as possible. And no, having a common core is not _the_ reason for not be able to change anything. For me that were the reasons to fork off from squeak. This dialect thing in smalltalk is really ridiculous. You cannot use such basic things like networking even across two different dialects. So you have to stay inside your own world/box. That is IMHO highly in- appropriate for these times. But I know some reasons why it is like this and that's the reason I can live with it. But there is room for improvement we should not miss. And I hope you can see that the support for basic technologies in smalltalk is way behind. The beauty and the strength of the language of smalltalk only lays within itself. Maybe I got you wrong but this mails triggered something in me so hence the more harsh tone :) Norbert On Jun 20, 2009, at 5:22 PM, Marcus Denker wrote: > > > > > On 20.06.2009, at 10:52, Cameron Sanders wrote: > > > >> They could probably all learn from the other flavors. In fact, the > >> cross-smalltalk portability is a negative for smalltalk. > >> > >> I believe I tried smalltalk/X... that's the natively-compiled one, > >> right? So it feels like C++ if you change a root class -- or am I > >> confusing it with another? I'm on a new platform and can't check > >> what all I installed last year, at the moment. > >> > >> I like the idea of a compiled version!! And there would be a place > >> for it in my world, *if* I could take code from Pharo and load it > >> into say, Smalltalk/X, and have it work without a month-long > >> debugging session. > > > > One huge problem with compatibility is always that it reduces any > > possibility in evolving/improving the system. If the goal is to be > > compatible to e.g. > > all of Smalltalk X, Visualworks, Squeak, Gemstone.... than, in the > > end, this means we can not do anything anymore, and, most > > importantly: we can not do any *fun* things anymore. > > > > Beeing compatible means reducing what you do to the subset of all > > the dialects, and than stop doing anything. > > > > If I you should choose between a) "inventing the future" and b) "be > > compatible to VisualWorks", what would you take? > > > > And I personally have already choosen for the "inventing the future" > > route, I guess. It makes > > no sense to be in Research (and beeing payed those wonderful tiny > > salaries) and than do boring stuff. > > That makes no sense. > > > > I personally think that the possibility and duty of working on > > interesting things is part of the overall compensation package of > > people in Research. > > > > Marcus > > > > -- > > Marcus Denker - http://marcusdenker.de PLEIAD Lab - Computer Science > > Department (DCC) - University of Chile > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Pharo-project mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project > > > _______________________________________________ > Pharo-project mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
