January 2012 - Pharo-dev - lists.pharo.org

Re: [Pharo-project] Cog+linux: external module not found
by Schwab,Wilhelm K Feb. 3, 2012

Feb. 3, 2012

Eliot, I'm getting the same error with your latest VM. Any ideas? Bill ________________________________ From: Eliot Miranda [eliot.miranda(a)gmail.com] Sent: Friday, January 06, 2012 5:37 PM To: Schwab,Wilhelm K Cc: Pharo-project(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Cog+linux: external module not found On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 2:32 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K <bschwab(a)anest.ufl.edu<mailto:bschwab@anest.ufl.edu>> wrote: Eliot, I'm getting an external library not found error on Ubuntu lucid with the Cog vm from http://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/29042/CogVM-Unix-13307.zip The library lives in /usr/lib and is known to ldconfig by the name that I have specified in #moduleName. What do I need to do? I don't know. Have you tried the latest Cog linux VM from my site? http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Cog/VM/VM.r2522/coglinux.tgz Bill -- best, Eliot

11 55

[Pharo-project] Smalltalk for small projects only?
by Janko MivÅ¡ek Feb. 1, 2012

Feb. 1, 2012

Hi guys, Ralph Johnson in his InfoQ interview made an interesting observation: 2:55 minute: "Smalltalk made an fundamental error ... image ... you can build something with 4-5 people what 50 people can build in Java, but if you take 200 people in Java ... it is really designed for small systems ... " Are we because of the image really destined for relatively small projects and small systems (of Java 50 people project size)? Are we really not able to scale to bigger projects/systems because of that? Ok, there are few exceptions of course (JPMorgan, OOCL, ..), but still... [1] http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop Best regards Janko -- Janko MivÅ¡ek Aida/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

20 81

[Pharo-project] Collection new
by Andrew P. Black Feb. 1, 2012

Feb. 1, 2012

Teaching a class of novices, it's not surprising that someone tried "Collection new". What was surprising is that this got the VM is a loop of some kind, with emergency stack dumps and so on. Here is my reply: > On 30 Jan 2012, at 01:18 , Xingzhi Harry Pan wrote: > >> ...it's pretty innocent: >> Collection new > > > OK. I looked at this. The problem comes when trying to print the collection. Somehow the VM gets confused when trying to do do: ... I'm not quite clear why. > > The quick fix is to change the Collection>>new method to > > self error: 'Collection is an abstract class, and cannot be instantiated' > > However this will break Heap>>new: , which sends super new. It ought to send self basicNew instead. > > These two changes seem to avoid the problem, but I'm waiting to see ... > > Andrew But I don't understand the root cause. Printing eventually sends do:, which is self subclassResponsibility. Why don't we get a clean failure? Andrew

6 8

[Pharo-project] a problem with a MorphTreeMorph with headers
by Esteban Lorenzano Feb. 1, 2012

Feb. 1, 2012

Hi, I have a problem for an application I have: I'm displaying a MorphTreeMorph who has a header and some columns, problem is when morph has a horizontal scrollbar and I need to go down, last element on list is covered by horizontal scroll bar and customer can't see his data. I need to solve this, but I don't know how, any help will be really appreciated. (the attached image shows my problem) thanks, Esteban

4 4

[Pharo-project] **Important** Pharo Conference Call for Date Feedback
by StÃ©phane Ducasse Feb. 1, 2012

Feb. 1, 2012

Hi guys We want to organize a Pharo Conference @ lille around business and companies in May/June 2012. Now we need you to understand what is the best to organize because we have some constraints (like not good access to rooms on saturday). Could you reply to the following questions: Are you planning to attend: Yes No Would you attend two days: Yes No Would you like to present something: Yes No Would you prefer to have (remove the one you do not like) - one friday and one saturday or - two days during the week would be not a problem. Would you like to have Handons: Yes No Business/Experience returns: Yes No What are the following dates that are ok for you? Frid 11- Satur 12 May 2012: Yes No Thur 10- Frid 11 May 2012: Yes No Mond 14- Tuesd 15 May 2012: Yes No Tuesd 15- Wedn 16 May 2012: Yes No Thur 24 - Frid 25 May 2012: Yes No Frid 25- Satur 26 May 2012: Yes No Stef

1 1

[Pharo-project] CogVM driver vs executable
by Sven Van Caekenberghe Jan. 31, 2012

Jan. 31, 2012

In response to my posting http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/pipermail/pharo-project/2012-January/058790.ht… I got feedback from people trying to use SSL with Eliot's CogVM http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Cog/VM/VM.r2522/coglinux.tgz instead of the Pharo one that I normally use http://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/29042/CogVM-Unix-13307.zip They reported that it did not work for them. So I tried this myself on my Ubuntu 11.10 (GNU/Linux 3.0.0-14-virtual i686) server and yes it fails with 'can't infer base LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Aborting.' which was discussed in this list before. I am not qualified to really understand those discussions. But when I used the executable 'inside' coglinux/lib/squeak/4.0-2522/squeak everything worked as expected. So the question is what does the driver (I don't know if that is the right word) coglinux/squeak or coglinux/bin/squeak do ? Since the pharo variant seems to operate fine without it, do we need the driver ? Sven

4 7

[Pharo-project] Fwd: [vwnc] Smalltalk for small projects only?
by Janko MivÅ¡ek Jan. 31, 2012

Jan. 31, 2012

-------- Prvotno sporoÄilo -------- Datum: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:54:58 -0600 Od: Peter Hunsberger <peter.hunsberger(a)gmail.com> With all due respect to the experience of everyone here, people really need to give up on this naive belief that Smalltalk development is any more efficient than development in any other language. The simple fact is that within the Smalltalk community a large portion of the developers have been using the tools for a long time and are very good at using them. Throw them at another environment and they are not as efficient. However, if you take new developers and throw them at a Smalltalk project it takes longer to get them up to speed than throwing them at a Java project simply because of the fact that Smalltalk is not as ubiquitous. I switched to Java back when IBM dropped Smalltalk, so I've seen both sides of this issue for a long time, so let me related some anecdotal experience: I'm currently working on a Smalltalk project that has about about 50 man years of effort in it over 10 years. Prior to this I worked on a Java and XSLt project that had about the same effort over the same period. Both have web based GUI's with a fair amount of JavaScript and the usual HTML crud and use a relational DB back end (SQL server and Oracle respectively). The Smalltalk project has had a mix of very experienced Smalltalk developers and inexperienced ones. The Java project was mainly junior and intermediate experience devs. I'd say the overall architecture and design was about equivalent; very different, but equally well done and comprehensive. The projects are very similar in concept and execution. The Java project had about twice as many function points (some pretty major) implemented and four times as many use cases supported at the point I switched to the Smalltalk project. For the most part this has little to do with the language itself. Rather, it is mainly, the supporting infrastructure that one is able to draw on in Java projects and this includes Eclipse, Git, etc. Open Source projects also played a big part of this, in the Java world one can pull in large chunks of functionality at very low cost (eg. XSLt 2.0 processors and pipelines, Spring, Hadoop, you name it) that are just not quite matched in the Smalltalk world. You can often get close, but it seems that there is always something missing, if only because the teams supporting the Smalltalk projects are often much smaller and just can't quite keep up with the every changing specs and requirements. Bottom line, don't kid yourself that there is any inherent advantage in using Smalltalk development over any other language. It is faster for experienced devs in small projects, but if you've got to pull a team together from scratch for some medium to large complexity enterprise scale project it is probably not going to fair as well. Now onto the main question posed here.... I have also worked on a successful 200 man year project (C and C++ in this case), which broke down to a little less than 100 people over a little more than 2 years. This was in the telecom world and involved many main frame billing interfaces and switching equipment interfaces, all very mission critical. In this case about 60% of the team was heads down developers. The rest of it was dedicated testers, tech writers, business analysts, project managers and managers. Here again the supporting infrastructure played an important role. Business analysts could write up use cases that got stored in a repository (a proprietary system) that could be used to generate test case stubs and documentation stubs. The development team tracked progress and bug reports in the same repository and source code version control was tied to the repository. End user documentation was stored in the repository and version controlled. It was simple to know what was going on anywhere in the project and to know where the problems were and what code did what and to see the entire life cycle of any portion of the code base from customer requirement to final deliverable. I know of no support infrastructure that even comes close in the Smalltalk world and would consider it madness to even consider taking on such a project using Smalltalk. Peter Hunsberger On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 2:37 AM, laurent laffont <laurent.laffont(a)gmail.com <mailto:laurent.laffont@gmail.com>> wrote: 200 developers on a project ? Scaring ..... They should use another technology than Java to go under 50 developers. They will save a lot of money :) Laurent 2012/1/28 Janko MivÅ¡ek <janko.mivsek(a)eranova.si <mailto:janko.mivsek@eranova.si>> Hi guys, Ralph Johnson in his InfoQ interview made an interesting observation: 2:55 minute: "Smalltalk made an fundamental error ... image ... you can build something with 4-5 people what 50 people can build in Java, but if you take 200 people in Java ... it is really designed for small systems ... " Are we because of the image really destined for relatively small projects and small systems (of Java 50 people project size)? Are we really not able to scale to bigger projects/systems because of that? Ok, there are few exceptions of course (JPMorgan, OOCL, ..), but still... [1] http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop Best regards Janko -- Janko MivÅ¡ek Aida/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

1 0

[Pharo-project] Fwd: [vwnc] Smalltalk for small projects only?
by Janko MivÅ¡ek Jan. 31, 2012

Jan. 31, 2012

-------- Prvotno sporoÄilo -------- Datum: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:07:34 -0800 Od: Jon Paynter <kittle31(a)gmail.com> > Dear Niall, > Thanks for comprehensive report, the biggest project reported so far. > I forwarded it to Squeak and Pharo mailing lists. > Has anyone data for other big Smalltalk projects/systems, like OOCL > etc? OOCL has 2 smalltalk projects The small one with 2,200 classes and 2 developers The larger one ranged from 20-50 developers (my guess), and currently has 24,000 classes. And the last time it was measured (a few years ago) we had around 8million lines of code. And my own personal $0.02 on productivity: One place I worked at as a contractor was a java shop. I was just learning java, so my skills at that time were lousy. We had a small project to do, and I managed to get 2 weeks of time from the local java expert. She came highly recommended by everyone, and after watching her work, she was in deed VERY good. After 2 weeks of struggle, we failed to finish the project. Afterwards, I sat down and did the project in visualworks ( from scratch) in 1 day. Experience matters, but using the right tool for the job is where its at.

1 0

[Pharo-project] Another video tutorial
by Lawson English Jan. 31, 2012

Jan. 31, 2012

Latest squeak tutorial. Connectors how-to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1LveflchAU as an aside, it seems to me that Connectors should be ported back to Pharo, because it can be very useful I am finding. Lawson

2 2

Re: [Pharo-project] Enthousiasm is the main currency among developers
by Marcus Denker Jan. 31, 2012

Jan. 31, 2012

On Jan 27, 2012, at 6:13 AM, dimitris chloupis wrote: > This article is really encapsulates the attitude and what is wrong with programming in general. The attitude of superiority and intelligence that seems to plague coders and being the biggest obstacle to progress. Yes! The "Everyone is dumb but me" phenomenon... What those "intelligent" people don't get is that complexity is inherently exponential. So even if you are 10 times more intelligent than me (very well possible), it is *completely* irrelevant considering that complexity grows non-linearly. If you combine this with the notion of Evolution: that it is impossible to creat "the perfect" out of nothing, yet entropy grows when you incrementally improve things... than this has some very serious consequences. > For me the main problem with is the whole aura of "elitism" , what better example than Lisp, where beginners are attacked and be excluded. We had the same effect in Squeak at the end. No progress, every improvement was actively fighted against, if needed with the nice argument that one can do it even better, and only "the best" is worth for Squeak. Another thing that "intelligent" people don't get is that critizising is trivial: You can *always* do better, there is no perfection. It's an endless process. This implies that one has to accept and embrace imperfection if one wants to have a future. Else you end up never finishing anything, the death of any incremental progress. Pharo was started with the explicit goal to do as many mistakes as possible, as fast as possible. Marcus -- Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de

9 13