I'm just a newbie, but for what it's worth, 'production readyness'  
and commercial value are only one way to measure something, and I  
don't think they were the yardsticks that Squeak was built by.

I use Ruby to make money with, but I don't have a lot of fun with it.  
For a long time (I've been programming for going on 30 years  
(assembler to C to C++ to PHP to Ruby), building software was work  
(hey, that's why they call it work), but Squeak has revitalized the  
fun part of programming for me.

I'm working on a game I visualized many, many years ago, but never  
had the technology to implement it with. I'm not writing it to sell,  
just for myself. Squeak is perfect for that kind of fun and exploration.

Thanks to all those who have obviously put a lot of hard work into  
this great environment.

-- John


On Aug 11, 2007, at 10:32 PM, Colin Putney wrote:

> 
>  On Aug 11, 2007, at 3:15 PM, Janko Mivšek wrote:
> 
> > "Anyone who says Squeak is production ready has never used Squeak  
> > in production. Recently quite a prominent member of the Squeak  
> > community seriously considered moving to Java because he could not  
> > get uptimes bigger than a two days. It turned out Delays and  
> > Semaphores (!!!) were broken all time along. There are dozens of  
> > issues like this. One example is that the settings of the GC are  
> > tuned for memory sizes of about 1 MB. Don't even get me started  
> > about the 1 GB and 120 MB memory issues which tend to crash the  
> > image. Or the bugs in ClassBuilder, InterpreterSimulator,  
> > Decompiler, .... You need to have several Squeak images per CPU  
> > because there is a limit to the amount of punishment a single  
> > Squeak image can take. Squeak itself is heavily forked (Squeak,  
> > Croquet, Sophie, SqueakLand, SmallLand, ... ). All the code in the  
> > image in unmaintained. There are teams but most of the time they  
> > don't even integrate submitted fixes for bugs. Development of  
> > these packages has stopped. The same situation for the VM. The  
> > only VM that is maintened is the Mac VM. The Windows VM will only  
> > get new builds if the maintainer needs some fixes for himself. The  
> > Unix VM is unmainted. The maintainer of the main VM code  
> > publically stated he will do shit unless someone pays him. Squeak  
> > is fully of ugly shit code that has just been hacked in for  
> > abandoned experiments. That http server Seaside uses on Squeak?  
> > Unmaintained and has bugs with HTTP 1.1. That really is just a  
> > small list of issues Squeak has."
> 
>  It's stated a bit harshly, but yeah, that sounds basically  
>  accurate. The amazing thing is that, in spite of all that, Squeak  
>  is still such a wonderful platform to work with. I do use Squeak in  
>  production, and there are very few things I would trade it for.
> 
>  Colin

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