[Cuis-dev] Politics of Smalltalk

[Casey Ransberger]

I’m generally of the persuasion that keeping politics the hell out of engineering creates a less toxic environment for people to exist in while trying to do work for free because passion. 

Didn’t always have that point of view. Infamously. Not sure I’ll keep it, either. 

I read the below, and saw what looks like a bug. Below, Philip Bernhart is thinking about things that have bothered me and compelled my thoughts from my beginnings as a programmer; I quit college because they wanted to shove two years of Ada down my throat before they’d let me work in C++, which I was already doing at home. I figured, Ada? *Great* choice of language if there are lives in your hands. 

I didn’t want to make missile guidance systems or air traffic control systems, so I quit, took a job at a startup, ended up here. Wanted to make delightful things rather than deadly things. Somehow found Cuis:)

To find the bug: I’d recommend looking at the period of time In which ARPA was rebranded as DARPA and J.C.R. Licklider exited the ARPA equation. The D stands for “defense” and prior to “ARPA getting the D” (apologies to everyone who caught the English language euphemism, I promise I won’t do it again) the ARPA Community was free to pursue science for the sake of science. 

During that period of time, a group of researchers at Xerox who had ARPA funding via Licklider started thinking about personal computing while studying the way children learn in order to create better future adults and we got Smalltalk as a side effect. 

Smalltalk in more ways was an exploration of how much further we could take Logo, Ivan Southerland’s ideas about user interfaces, some Scandinavian ideas about how to organize simulations, and a clear romantic vision of a more interesting future for both the individual and civilization as a whole. 

It’s true that ARPA did science for the US government, and the government weaponized some of the science ARPA did. But let’s not mistake the motives of scientists for the motives of their employers. Researchers, when they aren’t doing laundry, usually want to do research. 

—Casey

> On Jun 13, 2020, at 11:47 AM, Philip Bernhart via Cuis-dev <cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> today I had a quiet annoying "debate" with someone I know
> on the internet. XKCD for reference for the feeling of it:
> https://xkcd.com/386.
> 
> So I always wondered what the political statements and movements
> were in Smalltalk or even Cuis Smalltalk. Squeak, Pharo and Cuis
> did chose the very political MIT License as their License of choice.
> 
> Smalltalk was financed partially from the ARPA, so actually quiet
> political, right? When you consider that you can't escape making
> in some way political relevant decisions, then does that mean
> automatically that the Smalltalk community "thinks" it's good that
> their "open source" code is used within weapon systems. Maybe even
> in the context of Kapital to mess up finance systems or indirectly
> by using within Lam Research for producing circuits which could be
> used in war drones, etc.
> 
> Most of us I would think are spending their time toying around with
> Smalltalk, not considering every aspect of how we indirectly affect
> other people around the globe with our "naive" mind of just liking
> what we are doing.
> 
> 
> So what do you think, should we spend more time on that side?
> Philip
> 
> 
> PS: I got some popcorn here and I'm resting in a comfy chair.
> PPS: The current Yerba Mate infusion also adds to it.
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