Slate's slowness impeding UI/IDE development

[Brian Rice]

On Jun 11, 2006, at 7:43 PM, Mark Haniford wrote:

> So what is the "real" reason for Lee quitting in the first place?
> Maybe if Lee was bestowed the position of "Benevolant Dictator" then
> he would come back.

The last relevant quotes (over instant messaging) I got from him  
about his stance towards the project were:

"i can say with absolute certainty i have no interest in continuing it"

"i'm disinterested in where the project is going and i'm not sure we  
are capable of running it together to the mutual benefit of us both"

"as it has been it has been nothing more than parasitic to me"

If I may paraphrase further, basically he did not want to maintain a  
public project at all, and only cared about a hobby-level language 
+compiler+OS toolchain that ran on bare hardware. He actually  
*suggested* that we focus on the IDE to make Slate more useful rather  
than fret about performance. I'm not sure how he never took the  
performance issue seriously enough to realize that the UI-based IDE  
would be unusable without a dynamic inliner.

I am CC'ing him so that he can clarify his stance on this if he wishes.

> But wasn't Lee the only person working on the VM anyway?

Lee actually didn't originally like the idea of using a VM. I simply  
introduced a (buggy) Slate-to-C translator a la Squeak and sketched  
out a VM design just to get the ball rolling when we were stuck in a  
Common Lisp interpreter. If we hadn't done that, we'd still be there  
on CL since he never completed his compiler.

That said, he wrote most of the VM code and wound up maintaining it.  
He has a propensity to write pages and pages of really interesting  
code with no comments; I spoke with other people he has collaborated  
with and they've confirmed this. So it's non-trivial to pick up code  
that he wrote and run with it, and he got stuck with what he had  
written, with little-to-no desire to do so (apparently).

> Were other people trying to bogart in on the VM or were their  
> arguments about the design or what?

Towards the end there was a decent amount of clamoring for  
continuation support, which he apparently found unwarranted. He  
basically silently refused to code any support for it, while making  
hand-waving explanations about how easy it would be to get a subset  
of the functionality. At least a few people disagreed with him on the  
matter.

No one really criticized or tried to mess with the basic VM design or  
such; in fact I think he was its biggest critic.

The last that I heard, Lee was learning his father's real estate  
business and selling real estate in/near Las Vegas. I suggested a few  
open positions for the type of work he was doing with Slate, but it  
didn't interest him. He probably makes good money and is totally  
wasting his technical talent (or not - he occasionally just  
contributes to a few projects as a donor).

> I think Slate has some great ideas behind it.
>
> On 6/11/06, Brian Rice <water at tunes.org> wrote:
>> On Jun 11, 2006, at 6:28 PM, Mark Haniford wrote:
>> To Lee:
>>   How can we persuade you to return somehow? Would it need to involve
>> shedding some of the formalities of a public open-source project?

--
-Brian
http://tunes.org/~water/brice.vcf

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