Hi There, I'm the creator and maintainer of Redline.st This project has stalled right now because of other commitments. However, should there be renewed interested I would continue its development. - James.

When you are ready again, I expect my t-shirt. Will pay again :)

I ran the demo several times and I got a 1 second difference. I guess there is a place where even 1 second is important.

Hi there, I'm the creator of Redline and I very much want to complete it but other work and life items have got in the way. I hope to return to it just as soon as I can. - James.

Hey, be proud of what you were able to achieve, and look forward to the day when you can achieve any more.

Smalltalk was and is an amazing tool, one of the 100-year languages (if not, perhaps, one of the 1,000-year languages). The JVM is awfully popular, and will be for awhile. Java stole the steam from what should have been the Smalltalk decades; it's appropriate for there to be a decent Smalltalk on the JVM.

I hope you do; and I want my t-shirt!

>>there's not enough detail here to make me think he can actually pull off a 6 month development cycle of a new JVM based Smalltalk language

Redline Smalltalk runs today and compiles Smalltalk source into bytecode in Java Class format. The funding is to flesh out the runtime classes and tooling.

>>he's done a very poor job of convincing me to give him money I appreciate this feedback. Could you elaborate on what sort of things would convince you?

- James.

>> Could you elaborate on what sort of things would convince you?

What the money would actually be used for, which you just shed some more light on. It was really vague exactly which aspect(s) of the development the funds would be focused on, aside from "bringing the project to release", and you didn't really clarify how that's qualified. It's a highly technical project, I'd expect a little bit more meat.

Overall, I felt like there was some detail lacking with regard to the "how" of you getting to the goal. In theory, every funded development plan has some form of timeline(schedule/plan) and milestones, hopefully with some really vague dates or estimates. I just wasn't persuaded you had planned that far ahead yet. The project, based purely on the Indiegogo page, seemed to still be a hobby project that you enjoyed playing with. I simply can't justify adding to a $20,000 development fund based on the concept that you'll continue to flesh things out as you go along.

I haven't seen a serious track record of highly adopted open source projects from you(if I was looking in the wrong places or mistaken about the popularity of some of your projects, please correct me) and that doesn't persuade me to take you at your word. I'd need some meat in terms of what I'm actually funding and not what you hope to build. I can't in good conscience fund a project based on the end result or deliverable, I have to fund your process, planning ability, architectural consideration and senior experience; I could really only trust the last point, and not as much as I would have liked to.

I still appreciate what you're aiming to do, and that you've put so much energy into the concept already, but I don't appreciate it enough to contribute dollars. If you were looking for donations to continue to evolve the project after release and there was a community behind it saying good things, I'd be inclined to take the "end goal" as enough explanation and review the history of how things have evolved to see if I think you're reliable enough to fund. In this case, you want money to deliver an initial release, and I'm going to need to know how you want to get there.

>>I assume this is no longer the case with this project? Correct. Redline Smalltalk does not require an image file. Your source is kept in files just like you would Python or Ruby source. - James.

I investigated RTalk with interest and exchanged a few emails with Mark Roos. RTalk is nice but has a different goal.

Redline wants to support you and your existing tool chains, editors and environments that exist around the JVM. We want the best of Smalltalk in that environment (Redline), not a Smalltalk environment (RTalk) on the JVM. A subtle but important difference.

- James.

I'm not sure I see how Smalltalk would be very useful without a complete environment? Are you just implementing a Smalltalk(syntax) to bytecode/jar compiler? No support for dynamic execution/compiling code in any text-form? No adding behaviour to gui-object? No highly iterative development?

We are doing almost all of that.

You can already do dynamic execution and compilation. We just need hooks into ides like eclipse etc.

We have no near term plans to do anything GUI wise initially. But we would very much welcome someone taking that on.

The iterative development will be there. We support 'thisContext' which makes supplying a smalltalk style debugger with resumable exceptions, debugger driven development etc possible. It is just a matter of hooking into existing ones and working out any kinks.

We are not trying to be able to boot a full pharo environment while running on the jvm. version 1 roadmap is for integration with tools that already exist in the jvm ecosystem. if others want to run ahead and work on other environments ( including brand new ones ), we will lend a hand where we can.

Hopefully this answers your questions, if not feel free to join the mailing list and ask away in terms of questions. Or email me personally if you want, sean@monkeysnatchbanana.com And even if this does answer your questions, feel free to fire away with new ones on the mailing list or to me.

Thank you everyone for contributing these comments.

Quote> If the Smalltalk community wants to remain small, insular and essentially irrelevant .... However, if they want to win people back, it would be a good idea to take stock of what the rest of the world is up to and consider adopting it rather than insulting it. <Quote

Well said. I DON'T want Smalltalk to be irrelevant and breaking out of the image and working with 'your' tool chain and being free is how Redline is taking stock of the rest of the world. You won't find us insulting other languages.

Please give Smalltalk a try, it is a fun language to develop in and the barriers to getting started are being smashed by Redline.

- James.

We (http://redline.st) asked them for Smalltalk support, and they provided good assistance in us making our own plugin. Maybe you can try that approach yourself?

Thanks, interesting option, how long did it take you to finish by the way? is it open source?

There are other crowd funding platforms.

they do