On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 3:50 PM, Jimmie Houchin <jlhouchin@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, we need excellent FFI. I would love to see in Pharo FFI as easy as Julia [1] or LuaJIT [2]. I am not qualified to do deliver such. And I do not know how possible, how much effort or likely it is.
Sometimes connecting to an external library is a requirement. It would be nice to be able to easily do so. I had problems with NB and it never happened.
But, on the other hand. I am a big believer and advocate of keeping as much as possible in Pharo. Even if there are libraries available via FFI. Now I know being practical and expedient sometimes using the libraries is necessary at least initially.
I would love as much as possible in Pharo, in our language. This makes it available for us to improve, fix, and learn. It reduces the barrier for entry for those who only know Pharo. We can't do any of those things if it is in a foreign language in a foreign library. Reinventing the wheel so to speak is not always evil. But we do have to know our resources, time, people, community, skills. And as a Smalltalk or Smalltalk inspired tool. We need to have a long view of the world. We already have a longer history than most languages. We should likewise look forward to an even longer future. Always keep the big picture in front of us to inspire through the tedious minutiae that we may currently have to deal with.
And by the way. I would love having Random Forests and other scientific, statistic tools in Pharo. I need to look at the SciSmalltalk stuff.
You can join on SciSmalltalk mailing-list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/scismalltalk We have a repository here also: https://github.com/SergeStinckwich/SciSmalltalk Regards, -- Serge Stinckwich UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC) Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/