Help - Background - Remarks - The Squeak Community
Let me say something about the Squeak Community - which is a phrase I like to write with scare-quotes, because I personally don't much believe in internet-communities: I prefer to see people in the flesh and talk to them spontaneously before I make communities with them. Also, I have problems with "the", especially when some person I never met mails me with great apparent confidence that "the" "Squeak community" "does not want" such and such. Also, communities as such have no mind, memory, conscience or ideas - for only individuals have these
However, there is no Squeak without lots of people collaborating by means of the internet, and I may have just a little more skepticism about communities and the (ab)use of language than most.
So let me outline what this Squeak community really is at present:
- 25 to 50 technically quite or very knowledgeable persons spending daily some hours on Squeak and writing to the developers listThe numbers I list were also recently (in 2003) given by Dan Ingalls and Alan Kay, and the first two entries are easily checked. The estimates are somewhat conservative.
If you like
Squeak, it makes a lot of
sense to become a member of Squeak's developers' list, where all
manner of questions will be answered, nearly always politely and
sensibly, for it is a nice list, meant for intelligent and civilized
people who want to develop Squeak. In this way you become a recognized
member of the Squeak Community, and you can both learn and help
Squeak.
And it is an interesting community - many persons from many countries,
cooperating by means of the internet, who try to make a really good
open source programming environment - and also, as an
internet-community, something that is quite new in human history, for
this way of cooperating was not possible before the internet (and
Arpa-net).