- Pharo-dev - lists.pharo.org

Re: [Pharo-project] Popularity of Smalltalk in Software Industry

by Stefan Marr

(and here we go again...) On 06 May 2011, at 18:55, Miguel CobÃ¡ wrote: > El vie, 06-05-2011 a las 18:32 +0200, Stefan Marr escribiÃ³: >> Well, I think my work on the RoarVM is some contribution, no? Perhaps, I would be more interested in Pharo if it would actually run nicely on the RoarVM, but I am stuck with a Squeak 3.x MVC image for my day to day work. And without anyone from the community approaching the work to make Pharo thread-safe that won't change. It is nice to change the world with Pharo, but the future is multi/manycore and Pharo does not support it. Ah, and the day has just 24h so don't expect anything from me beside the VM work, thats already enough to keep a whole team busy. >> > > I found your post very contradicting and without internal consistency. > You don't care about smalltalk but are creating a vm should run > smalltalk (squeak or pharo) in multiple core. Don't get it. Or you care > that you dedicate time to it or you don't care and don't know why you > build a multicore vm for a system you don't care (maybe the money, the > papers, the citations, don't know) I am interested in VMs, so why do I need to care about the language on top? Actually, I do research in how to support all kind of different languages on top of the same VM, because there is not a single language that is the ultimate answer to all problems. That is why I do not care about any particular language. Just look at the JVM. How much of its technology was developed in the pure Java context? Not a lot. Most was actually conceived for Smalltalk. As long as the languages have some commonalities and are not based on graph-reduction like Haskell, then they usually don't require a completely new designed VM, but a nice set of common abstractions. So why, as a researcher, should I care about Smalltalk? Smalltalk is not the final answer, and will never be. Neither is any other single language. >>>> That's what I mean. From my perspective, books about programming languages are a wast of effort. >> That is BS. >> How often do you see your colleagues going to the library, or the > shelf next door to grab a book while they are programming? >> It has been 10 years ago that they stopped doing so. > > That is the reason that O'Reilly books is broken and stop printing books > 5 year ago right. Also this other publisher, I think they use to call > themselves the pragmatic progammer, what a bunch of loser, trying to > publish new books in this days that google has everything that is to > know. > > Wait, no, they exists and publish books, maybe is for having something > to do with their free time. Just answer the question! How often do your colleagues grab a book from the shelf? How often a day, how often a week? >> Today, they google. Well, at least if they use another language than Smalltalk. >> And I don't think there is something inherently wrong with that. >> > > Yes but isn't the only way to get knowledge. No, but to my experience books can only be a help to get an initial overview. How often do you come across a book that covers a topic in such a depth that you actually can use it when you have a specific question while working? Especially the Pragmatic Programmer books you refer to, most of them talk about the basic concepts. They are not full references. Nice introductions, but nothing to actually work with when you solve a deeper going problem. > Maybe assembler should be > lectured no more, because we have high level programing languages and > nobody needs that old tech anymore! What are you talking about? > You said: >>> That's what I mean. From my perspective, books about programming > languages are a wast of effort. > > and then: > >> I think, Stef's efforts of writing books should be supported, > > inconsistent! Right, it is indeed inconsistent, since that statement now also includes having books for introductory purposes. But again, that was not the initial point of the discussion. Still, there is already a good thing coming out of the whole flame war. Laurent took the time to look into how to make the books web-accessible. All it took was a small nudge in the right direction. Best regards Stefan -- Stefan Marr Software Languages Lab Vrije Universiteit Brussel Pleinlaan 2 / B-1050 Brussels / Belgium http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr Phone: +32 2 629 2974 Fax: +32 2 629 3525

May 6, 2011

Re: [Pharo-project] Relational Databases [WAS] Re: Nile tests red - Pharo 1.3

by Alain rastoul

Cool. Looks like really worth to have a look at dbxtalk -- Alain_rastoul

May 6, 2011

Re: [Pharo-project] [COTDC] 60 - DirectoryURI

by laurent laffont

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 8:21 PM, laurent laffont <laurent.laffont(a)gmail.com>wrote: > Today: DirectoryURI > This class is empty and only referenced in URI class, could be replaced by HierarchicalURI.... Should we remove / deprecate it ? Laurent. > > > Comment Of The Day Contest - One Day One Comment > Rules: > #1: Each day a not commented class is elected. Each day the best comment > will be integrated with name of the author(s). > #2: If you cannot comment it, deprecate it. > Results: http://code.google.com/p/pharo/wiki/CommentOfTheDayContest > > Laurent >

May 6, 2011

Re: [Pharo-project] DBXTalk (SqueakDBX) goes to Pharo 1.3

by Alain rastoul

++ :) Will test mssql asap (next week) On Fri, 29 Apr 2011 22:39:43 +0200, StÃ©phane Ducasse<stephane.ducasse(a)inria.fr> wrote: > +1 -- Alain_rastoul

May 6, 2011

Re: [Pharo-project] doesNotUnderstand:/createActualMessageTo: for zero-argument sends appears to imply the need for an extra stack slot in methods

by Toon Verwaest

Seems to make sense. If they didn't allocate small/big frames but exactly just enough space for the arguments this will indeed fail. You could also change the DNU to reallocate the frame on demand; maybe even only if the argsize is 0? I don't know the implementation details obviously, but it seems like you would waste less space to do it that way; although you will get a slight performance hit for the DNU, but that seems less relevant. cheers, Toon On 05/06/2011 07:39 PM, Eliot Miranda wrote: > Hi All, > > could you check my reasoning here. I think I've found a serious > bug in the VM with doesNotUnderstand: processing for zero-argument > sends and the calculation of the necessary stack size in > MethodNode>>generate:* (senders of CompiledMethod>>needsFrameSize:). > The bug causes a push beyond the end of a context, overwriting the > header of the following object, when an MNU occurs for a zero-argument > send when the stack is full. If you look at > Interpreter>>createActualMessageTo: it does the following to push the > message created as the argument of the doesNotUnderstand: > > self pop: argumentCount thenPush: message > > If argumentCount is zero this pushes an item on the stack. If the > stack is full at this point (the receiver of the not-understood > message is the last item in the context) then the push will be out of > bound of the activeContext's stack and overwrite the first word of the > following object's header. > > We observe this with a Newspeak application at Cadence and see a > subsequent VM crash. > > 1. am I right? > > 2. is this an old bug? > > 3. did this, or did this not, affect Smalltalk-80 v2 and e.g. the > Dorado implementation, and if so why (e.g. was the message of an MNU > not pushed onto the stack, and instead MNUs activated by special > code?, or was the activeContext not on the heap? or...) > > 4. what's the right fix? It seems to me that the right fix is simply > to add one to the needed stack depth, with an explanatory comment, but > in senders of CompiledMethod>>needsFrameSize: or > in CompiledMethod>>needsFrameSize:? Trying to avoid pushing the > argument of an MNU is going to involve lots of changes to the VM and > will be tricky and likely have a bug tail. > > > best, > Eliot

May 6, 2011

Re: [Pharo-project] Send a notification

by Alexandre Bergel

Thanks, Alexandre On 6 May 2011, at 15:59, Jan van de Sandt wrote: > > On May 6, 2011 8:45 PM, "Alexandre Bergel" <alexandre.bergel(a)me.com> wrote: > > > > > As long as your SMTP doesn't require encryption this is simple: Use > > > MailSender that comes with every Pharo image. Seaside provides some > > > objects on top of that, so that you don't have to assemble the message > > > by hand. > > > > Ok, we will check > > > > >> We then thought about emitting twitts, but there is a need to authorize the client. Anyone has experience? > > > > > > Twitter requires OAuth, which requires an SSL capable HTTP client. > > > > Does this mean this cannot be done now in Pharo? > > It can be done in Pharo using CloudforkSSO. See http://blog.doit.st > > Jan. > > > > > Alexandre > > -- > > _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: > > Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu > > ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;. > > > > > > > > > > > > -- _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.

May 6, 2011

Re: [Pharo-project] Popularity of Smalltalk in Software Industry

by laurent laffont

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 9:16 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K <bschwab(a)anest.ufl.edu>wrote: > Laurent, > > I am starting to understand your pain, or at least how it manifests itself > in my world. First, the search path for libraries (Unix VM) can be a > problem, not because of how it works, but because it does not tell me what > it is trying to do. IMHO, any time the vm translates something (library > name to search path, COM port name to number or vice versa), it should > describe what it did, perhaps only if the attempt to open/load/whatever > fails (if a load works, I'm probably happy and not looking). I have been > known to hack the vm to add such tracing - syslog, stdout - wherever, but > somewhere. > Yes. I remember some mails you sent on this subject some months ago. > Mangled names are another topic, but I do NOT consider this to be a > Squeak/Pharo/VM failing of any type. The author of the library failed to > use extern "C" - simple as that. I wonder why Python / Ruby can manage mangled names and that FFI don't. Because it's a real pain. Laurent. > The most recent encounter I had with this was on Windows, and I left behind > the following comment: > > The conspicuous (in hindsight) absence of extern "C" from > the header file comes at a price: the names are mangled. > Enter pexports.exe and some copy/paste with periodic > acerbic remarks. > > Translation: if you have not done this, consider using pexports.exe to > obtain the true exported symbol names, and put them (with ?@, etc. intact) > in your FFI definitions. HTH. > > Bill > > > ________________________________________ > From: pharo-project-bounces(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr [ > pharo-project-bounces(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr] On Behalf Of laurent laffont > [laurent.laffont(a)gmail.com] > Sent: Friday, May 06, 2011 2:34 PM > To: Pharo-project(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr > Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Popularity of Smalltalk in Software Industry > > On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 8:06 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K <bschwab(a)anest.ufl.edu > <mailto:bschwab@anest.ufl.edu>> wrote: > No real agenda either way here, except to say that we almost have that in > FFI. If you know enough to make the call, do you not know enough to write > the FFI wrapper? Just asking. Having stirred the broth, I'll shut up and > learn :) > > > > My last attempts: > > http://forum.world.st/Re-Z3950-on-OSX-module-yaz3-not-found-tp3161332p31613… > > http://forum.world.st/Re-FFI-crashes-VM-on-Linux-was-Z3950-on-OSX-module-ya… > > Any help appreciated. > > Laurent. > > > > > ________________________________________ > From: pharo-project-bounces(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr<mailto: > pharo-project-bounces(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr> [ > pharo-project-bounces(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr<mailto: > pharo-project-bounces(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr>] On Behalf Of laurent laffont > [laurent.laffont(a)gmail.com<mailto:laurent.laffont@gmail.com>] > Sent: Friday, May 06, 2011 1:47 PM > To: Pharo-project(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr<mailto: > Pharo-project(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr> > Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Popularity of Smalltalk in Software Industry > > On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 7:25 PM, Igor Stasenko <siguctua(a)gmail.com<mailto: > siguctua(a)gmail.com><mailto:siguctua@gmail.com<mailto:siguctua@gmail.com>>> > wrote: > On 6 May 2011 18:45, laurent laffont <laurent.laffont(a)gmail.com<mailto: > laurent.laffont(a)gmail.com><mailto:laurent.laffont@gmail.com<mailto: > laurent.laffont(a)gmail.com>>> wrote: > > On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 4:01 PM, Igor Stasenko <siguctua(a)gmail.com > <mailto:siguctua@gmail.com><mailto:siguctua@gmail.com<mailto: > siguctua(a)gmail.com>>> wrote: > >> > >> Is it works because someone already provided a bindings for libraries > >> you mention, > >> or you did it by yourself? > > > > Have just used ctypes: > >>>> import ctypes > >>>> import ctypes.util > >>>> ctypes.util.find_library("yaz") > > '/usr/local/lib/libyaz.dylib' > >>>> yaz = ctypes.cdll.LoadLibrary("libyaz.dylib") > >>>> con = yaz.ZOOM_connection_new("z3950.loc.gov<http://z3950.loc.gov>< > http://z3950.loc.gov>", 7090); > > oh cool.. give me a 5 minutes to load external library, look up the > random symbol exported by it > and make a call to it with random number of arguments, and expect it > won't crash. > > Works outta box! Cool. > > Now serious. How about spending time writing a bindings for that library? > Where you have properly organized classes/interfaces, error handling > and other stuff. > No takers? > > Seriously, if you want such kind of shitty interface, which allows you > to call arbitrary function with arbitrary arguments > without any argument type checking, i can write it for you. > > > Do it, please do it. Seriously. Thanks > > Laurent. > > > > > Laurent > > -- > Best regards, > Igor Stasenko AKA sig. > > > > > >

May 6, 2011

[Pharo-project] ODBC Connection in Pharo 1.1.1

by Torsten Bergmann

Did you see: http://www.pharocasts.com/2010/12/access-database-through-odbc.html -- NEU: FreePhone - kostenlos mobil telefonieren und surfen! Jetzt informieren: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/freephone

May 6, 2011

Re: [Pharo-project] Send a notification

by Jan van de Sandt

On May 6, 2011 8:45 PM, "Alexandre Bergel" <alexandre.bergel(a)me.com> wrote: > > > As long as your SMTP doesn't require encryption this is simple: Use > > MailSender that comes with every Pharo image. Seaside provides some > > objects on top of that, so that you don't have to assemble the message > > by hand. > > Ok, we will check > > >> We then thought about emitting twitts, but there is a need to authorize the client. Anyone has experience? > > > > Twitter requires OAuth, which requires an SSL capable HTTP client. > > Does this mean this cannot be done now in Pharo? It can be done in Pharo using CloudforkSSO. See http://blog.doit.st Jan. > > Alexandre > -- > _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: > Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu > ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;. > > > > > >

May 6, 2011

Re: [Pharo-project] Send a notification

by Alexandre Bergel

> As long as your SMTP doesn't require encryption this is simple: Use > MailSender that comes with every Pharo image. Seaside provides some > objects on top of that, so that you don't have to assemble the message > by hand. Ok, we will check >> We then thought about emitting twitts, but there is a need to authorize the client. Anyone has experience? > > Twitter requires OAuth, which requires an SSL capable HTTP client. Does this mean this cannot be done now in Pharo? Alexandre -- _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.

May 6, 2011