Re: Project Direction

On 1 mai 07, at 02:22, David Griswold wrote:

> I'm sure some of you have noticed that I've been mostly off the  
> list for the last few months- my apologies.
> I became fairly discouraged after it became apparent to me late  
> last year that there wasn't a critical mass of people with the  
> right kind of experience ready to pick up the Strongtalk system and  
> run with it, at least in terms of developing and supporting the  
> system as a whole right now.  Not that I ever thought there was  
> that high a probability of that happening immediately, but it was  
> worth a shot to see if the Smalltalk community would rise to the  
> occasion.  Dan Ingalls even offered a $5,000 reward last year for  
> someone to port Squeak to the Strongtalk virtual machine, but there  
> were no takers. While the Smalltalk community as a whole did not  
> rise to the occasion, those of you on this list are the exceptions  
> to that, and I thank you for your interest, enthusiasm, and  
> participation so far.

Hi david

in fact this was not clear to me that dan was offering that. Because  
if this is still correct we can
really advertise it. ESUG could even add some money for that.
Could you contact dan and really ask him?

>  You have to understand that no one from the original Strongtalk  
> project, me included, has the time or desire to pick up that load.   
> In the years when Strongtalk sat on a shelf at Sun, we all moved on  
> to other, non-Smalltalk-related things.  I got involved again  
> because the overall vision for the system was originally mine, so I  
> probably care the most about it, and I wanted to make sure that the  
> design philosophy was carried on, and that someone was available to  
> answer questions. But this is still very much a side project for  
> me, although I absolutely still believe to this day, that there is  
> still no programming language and virtual machine as advanced as  
> Strongtalk.
>
> The big problem at the moment is that the system is far from  
> complete, and there are large, highly complex parts of the system  
> that there is no one to work on, for example
> The user interface needs major work to update it, finish it, and  
> port it.  I could do this, but I simply don't have the time.
> The typechecker needs significant design changes that are probably  
> not going to happen soon.
> A debugger needs to be written, and I don't have the time to do  
> this, either.
> The bottom line is that in the near term I don't think we are going  
> to be able to really support Strongtalk as a complete system that  
> is usable by developers.  I considered giving up my involvement in  
> the project, but after a lot of thought, I've concluded that there  
> is still a path forward.
>
> Development Direction
> So how can we get Strongtalk on the path to being a supportable,  
> complete system, or at the very least, something that survives and  
> is of use to people, not just as a demonstration?  For now, I think  
> we need to defer any attempt to support the entire system right  
> now, and focus almost entirely on the following three things:
> Increasing VM reliability
> Porting the VM to UNIX-like operating systems like Linux and MacOS
> Porting Squeak to the Strongtalk VM
> For Strongtalk to survive, we need a larger community to become  
> enthusiastic about it, and convinced of the need for it to  
> survive.  I think the only feasible way of accomplishing that right  
> now is to make the Strongtalk virtual machine a usable alternative  
> to the Squeak virtual machine.  To do that it will need to be  
> grafted to Squeak, made more reliable, and made to run on some  
> major platforms that Squeak is used on.
>
> Once a larger group of people see how fast the Strongtalk VM  
> actually is, running a code base that they are familiar with, I  
> believe we would create a lot more interest in the Strongtalk  
> technology.  Also, in the short term, we would get a finished,  
> supported Smalltalk stack sitting on top of the VM.
>
> Hopefully, this would help get a critical mass of developers  
> interested in working on the virtual machine.  Once that happens,  
> many other things would become easier, including spending more time  
> on development of the Strongtalk code base above the virtual  
> machine.  But for that, time will tell.
>
> At the moment, it looks like there is starting to be a reasonable  
> group of you folks out there working on how to port the VM, so  
> that's a good start- thanks again.  I'll start trying to  
> consolidate your changes into the trunk where that is appropriate.   
> Otherwise, I'm going to start focusing on a Squeak port.  It looks  
> like we have the possibility of getting a little money to pay  
> someone to help out with that from Summertalk, so hopefully we can  
> get going on that pretty quickly.
> Cheers,
> -Dave
>
> >


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