[self-interest] Re: Self on Linux (was: Self 4.1)

[Thorsten Dittmar]

Hi,

Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:


> I would say that the current "Kansas" GUI in Self is an excelent
> start. In the Squeak mailing list, Alan Kay said that John Maloney
> felt "relieved" to go back to the traditional browsers in Smalltalk.
> My experience is the exact opposite - after programming in Squeak
> for a while it is always pure joy to be back in Self. It is a
> matter of taste, I guess.

As you may know Kent Beck worked for a long time in our company, so we have
some kind of XP tradition here. This is the reason why I love the
Refactoring Browser very much and small lint in some way too (have not so
much eXPeriences with it;-). I'm one of the old (a 10 years fellowship now)
square bracket knights and I really fall in love with this language, but one
of the weaknesses of Smalltalk is the home is my castle stuff (the image and
my team). Envy, Team/V etc. tried to fix this problem, but to fundamental
problem is that the world of the programmer (his personal image), the world
of the other programmers and the world of the user (the application)
normally fit not very well together. Please don't miss understand me, the
image is a beautiful place to program and a lovely place to modify your
tools in a way how you want to have them, but is it also the right place for
the application?


> > There are a lot of
> > things in Self that makes quite interesting for us. So right now we
> > try to find out what we must do to evaluate Self.
>
> The best thing is to try it out on a high end Sparcstation. I
> haven't seen it on the Mac yet (but intend to really soon).
>
> > Maybe it is cheaper
> > to port it to Linux instead of buy a lot of new machines.
>
> Yes - that is the best option. But it is much harder to do the
> port if you don't have access to a working version (which is
> the case of some people on the list who have worked on a port
> so far).

That is true. When I understand the situation correctly, there is a port for
linux from Gordon. It is not finished, but maybe we find a way altogether to
help him. It would be a big step for Self. If there is no other way we would
try the mac port (a power book is a little bit cheaper then a sparc)

>
> > If
> > everything works fine we will invest some money in our Self
> > development, but this is not sure now. We will have a lot of work to
> > do before we can be sure that Self is the right language for our
> > plans. For example our lawyer will contact Sun (in person David and
> > his chief) to find out, if there are some foot traps for us in the
> > license or not.
>
> It just says:
>
>    LICENSE:
>
>    You may use the software internally, modify it, make
>    copies and distribute the software to third parties,
>    including redistribution for profit, provided each copy
>    of the software you make contains the copyright notice
>    set forth above, the disclaimer below, and the authorship
>    attribution below.
>
> I have looked at all the Open Source licenses out there and this
> is probably the simplest and least ambiguous of all (close to
> the BSD one).

That is true. But maybe not enough, we will see. It depends hardly on our
future plans.

>
> > And BTW there are also a lot of technical questions
> > and we must find answers for this stuff.... so we will see cu
>
> Here is the perfect place for it!
>
I hope so.

Thorsten Dittmar