[ANSI-Smalltalk] What do the vendors think?

[John O'Keefe]

As much as I would like any future standardization process to be open, I
think we are stuck with ANSI (at least for the base!) since the community
has no real way to recreate the existing standard outside ANSI.  Further,
having a standard blessed by a recognized standards body is important to the
vendors -- "gravitas", visibility, and marketing -- but not critical (in my
mind).  The really important thing about the standard is that it provides a
definition of how some subset(s) of Smalltalk works that is agreed to (and
implemented) by all vendors.  This can be done with or without a standards
body blessing the definition.
So what are the important things to do w.r.t. standardization:

   1. Encourage community participation in the standards activity
   2. Make the resulting standard(s) available to a wide audience
   3. Produce an "errata" to the existing standard to correct the errors
   that exist in it and clarify areas where it is confusing/inexact
   4. Extend the standard into new areas where agreement can be reached

These goals can be addressed outside ANSI (and, in fact, #1 and #2 can be
done better outside ANSI).  If we (the community or some subset) decide at
the end of the activity that we really want it to be an ANSI standard, then
we could go through the costly bureaucratic process of converting the "open"
document(s) into ANSI-blessed documents.

I guess another of my concerns with being tied to ANSI is that we may invest
a lot of time and $$ in dealing with ANSI and end up with nothing as a
result if the participants lose interest somewhere in the midst of the
effort.  With an open process, whatever work is done will be available even
if no actual standard ever appears.

 On Jan 31, 2008 8:50 AM, Bruce Badger <bwbadger at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would be particularly interested to hear the views of the Smalltalk vendor
> companies about how they feel about ANSI/INCITS, open process
> and all that.
>  I wonder if the gravitas that would come with working with ANSI (or
> perhaps another standards body) is important to them, and if they
> think it may be important to their customers or potential customers.
>  Thanks :-)
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John O'Keefe [|], Principal Smalltalk Developer, Instantiations Inc.
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