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From: Igor Stasenko <siguctua@gmail.com>
To: Pharo Development <Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr>
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:58:26 PM
Subject: [Pharo-project] Processes, what are they doing?

Have you ever seen the list of processes running under your OS?
There's many, isn't?
The operating systems may be different, but i'd like to tell, what is
common between all of them:
- by looking at list of processes you have no idea what each of them
there for, nor what are they doing.

For instance, my  home windows machine has strange peaks of disk
activity (when it supposed to be idle, since it is not touched
more than a hour)...
now this is annoying that i cannot ask system in easy way, what is
going on and why such heavy disk activity is needed,
and disable such "very important feature"..
Today's systems grown too large and too clever, where user more and
more feels like a passenger (which request to stop the train can be
silently ignored), rather than driver of the train who can stop it at
any moment.

Since i cannot tell, what each process doing on my machine.. i cannot
control them.
There's of course a solution: i should spend hours with google , read
docs & manuals
and in general, look for anywhere else, rather than simply ask a
process: what are you doing, what is your responsibility and who runs
you and why.

Besides, if i cannot ask the process, my study of a system is more or
less just a waste of time, because even if i learn everything,
tomorrow it will be different OS version or different OS, where
everything will be completely different, and there we starting over
again: having a list of processes and no clue which is responsible for
what and do you need it or not.

Sure thing, i am not proposing to change the world and fix today's
operating systems, but what i thought that at least in Pharo we have a
good
opportunity to fix that.

I think it would be beneficial to establish a quality standard (or at
least make an attempt to move closer to it):
- each running process should have a description what its purpose and
who/what running it, as well as how to terminate it in non-abrupt way.

In practice it means that one should not write:
[ ... ] fork

but

[ ... ] forkWithDescription: 'i doing this that and there'

or even:

[ ... ] forkWithDescription: 'i doing this that and there'
toTerminateDo: [.. block for graciously terminating this process
regardless in which state it currently is ]

So, my question are you with me or not? :)
And how far?

0 - keep things as they are
...
1 - deprecate all protocols which allow anonymous process creation,
and force developers to always put a description for every #fork in
their code.
(or simply refuse to #resume the process unless its description is not nil ;)

There is already field in Process - name. But it is not enforced by
system that it should be never nil. I am not sure if we need both name
and description
or we need just one field (which will serve for both). What i am sure
about is that anonymous processes are BAD.

--
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko.