Re: Project Direction

I think one of the problems (ok, actually, my biggest problem) is not
knowing who is working on what.  Does the google wiki support a task
list of any sort of project management feature that we could use?

I can volunteer 3-4 hours a week to work on some aspect of the items
you have identified.  I'll pick up my work once the various changes
that have been contributed by prunedtree, Thiago and others have been
merged back to Trunk -- heck, I can even help with sorting through
those if you'd like.

Just let me know.

-- the other dave.

On Apr 30, 7:22 pm, "David Griswold" <[email protected]> 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.
>
> 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
>   a.. 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.
>   b.. The typechecker needs significant design changes that are probably not
> going to happen soon.
>   c.. 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
>   a.. 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:
>     a.. Increasing VM reliability
>     b.. Porting the VM to UNIX-like operating systems like Linux and MacOS
>     c.. 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


--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Strongtalk-general" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/strongtalk-general?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---