Squeak is increasingly forgetting about objects and becomming obsessed with code. And it is staggeringly good at code - development is brilliant.

But although there are a million sophisticated ways to file in, manipulate, research and run code, there are no standard ways to deal with music, photos, or even non-code text.

What Squeak could easily be: www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/ www.apple.com/itunes/ www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink/ www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/

What Squeak seems to want to be: www.eclipse.org/

I was just asking Mark Guzdial about his book “Squeak: Open Personal Computing and Multimedia” last week. I asked if he was going to write an updated edition, since his book was written for Version 2.9. The response I got back from him was forlorn. He said no updated edition was planned, but he attributed this more to it not selling well. He was also critical of the team in charge of Squeak now:

“The current version is quite disappointing. It’s been taken over by a pure software engineering group, so music synthesis (for example) no longer works. They just don’t care to keep it going.”

Does that sound like Squeak is being killed? I’d have to say yes, at least for the educational community. I have not been hearing these complaints from Seaside developers, for example.

I asked Guzdial what’s the most recent version he would recommend. He said 3.2.

It’s striking to me that updated versions, which have been marked “stable”, have features that are broken that used to work. This is just my impression, but it’s sounding like the team has unintentionally forked it already, since it looks like multimedia has gotten “the shaft” in the more recent releases. I’m not saying this was necessarily done intentionally. I’m just describing the effect.

IMO, from a user perspective this is not good. This gets into perceptions. I was drawn to Squeak because of the screencasts I’ve seen of Alan Kay demonstrating it. They’re a few years old, but his focus was on Squeak being an educational tool, that students could use it to conduct experiments, manipulate graphics, video, sound, etc. Since it’s sounding like these aspects are starting to break, I imagine it’s alienating that community. I think that’s sad, because I think Squeak had real potential there.

For me personally, I’m interested in the multimedia aspects, just for the fun of it, but the real draw for me was Seaside.

On the engineering side, just a guess, it sounds like it all comes down to detecting dependencies. With everything being an object, would it not be possible to write a utility that shows what other objects are dependent on an object that is being modified, or removed? Once you can see these dependencies, would it not help in making intelligent decisions about what to do?

My impression is that working on Squeak at fundamental levels is like working on an operating system. It’s very complicated work–very easy to break things you didn’t intend to break.

I sincerely wish you the best in your efforts. Asking these questions shows that you DO care, contrary to what Guzdial said. I guess if I could make one request it would be that you be MUCH more careful about how you label versions. Only label a version “stable” when it appears to be such from all aspects.

In “a full, living, complex ecosystem” in Nature, when critters come together they sometimes kill each other, and sometimes kill the ecosystem. That’s a problem in our “full, living, complex ecosystem of objects” - when we introduce new stuff, the new behaviours are sometimes incompatible and kill the ecosystem.

We get to play Zoo Keeper - we get to invent ways to package behaviours that would be incomprehensible in Nature.

Like classboxes
www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/Archive/Papers/Berg03aClassboxes.pdf