January 2015 - Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Re: [Pharo-users] Useful tools?

by Paul DeBruicker

The other thing I'd add is if you have an area of interest then let us know so people can point you to things relevant to you. There is a lot out there, if somewhat poorly organized. Laura wrote > Hi all, > > What are some tools / plug-ins/ projects / packages / frameworks > you find very useful or you use very frequently for development? > (please for each name it and state it's purpose) > I'm a newcomer to Pharo , so it hasn't to be something rare. > > > On the side... > I feel curious about how one gets to know about the existence of such > resources. Is there any sort of "resources index" (like a wiki page with > categories)? Besides books which can't be comprehensive because of their > nature. Such an index would be extremely handy in many ways. > Do you agree? Is it plausible, if it doesn't exist, to built it > collaboratively? > > It is a sad thing that useful tools go unnoticed when they could have > solved a problem you faced or eased your work if only you've known about > their existence. For what i've read on spread posts i feel like there are > many such tools. > > I had this experience of useful resource existence ignorance with > TilingWindowManager (LaurentLaffont ) and with RBConfigurableFormatter (by > the way i can't figure out how to turn it on). Now i feel like having a > multiclipboard would be useful (i have one on my OS but anyway...) > > Best, > Laura -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Useful-tools-tp4799187p4799391.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Jan. 13, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Useful tools?

by Paul DeBruicker

Hi Laura, Laura wrote > Hi all, > > What are some tools / plug-ins/ projects / packages / frameworks > you find very useful or you use very frequently for development? > (please for each name it and state it's purpose) > I'm a newcomer to Pharo , so it hasn't to be something rare. When I was starting I used: Terse Guide To Squeak: http://squeak.joyful.com/LanguageNotes (describes the syntax and provides a one line example for most of what a person uses on a day to day basis while coding, not so much for reading code/exploring the image) and http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-Best-Practice-Patterns-Kent/dp/013476904X and the mailing lists. > On the side... > I feel curious about how one gets to know about the existence of such > resources. Is there any sort of "resources index" (like a wiki page with > categories)? Besides books which can't be comprehensive because of their > nature. Such an index would be extremely handy in many ways. > Do you agree? Is it plausible, if it doesn't exist, to built it > collaboratively? I agree 100%. There is a nascent one being created here: http://smalltalkrenaissance.wordpress.com/resources/ > It is a sad thing that useful tools go unnoticed when they could have > solved a problem you faced or eased your work if only you've known about > their existence. For what i've read on spread posts i feel like there are > many such tools. > > I had this experience of useful resource existence ignorance with > TilingWindowManager (LaurentLaffont ) and with RBConfigurableFormatter (by > the way i can't figure out how to turn it on). Now i feel like having a > multiclipboard would be useful (i have one on my OS but anyway...) For several unimportant reasons automatic code formatting was removed in Pharo 2.0 and has not been restored to the official images. To get it in Pharo 3 you have to load a slice from the Pharo30 inbox. The Pharo30Inbox should be in your list of repositories in your Monticello browser. Once youve opened it search for SLICE-Issue-14387-ressurrect-format-on-accept-and-format-on-display Load the package in the pane on the right hand side. Once the slice is loaded open the settings browser from the world menu. Choose the 'Code Browsing' section and click the boxes next to 'Pretty Print' and 'Format code on accept' Good luck Paul > Best, > Laura -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Useful-tools-tp4799187p4799390.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Jan. 13, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Object select or create methods

by Paul DeBruicker

Hi - comments below sergio_101 wrote > During my daily work in another framework, we are able to do something > very > handy like so: > > myThing := Thing findOrCreateByKey: 'red_thing'. > > where the key is some underscored all lower case unique name for an object > we will be calling all the time. > > this will return either a new thing with a key of 'red_thing' or the > current one that already exists. In your example above what type of object is Thing? If the object stored at red_thing is to be a global then you'd want Thing>>findOrCreateByKey: aKey ^Smalltalk at: aKey ifAbsentPut:[self createThingFor:aKey] Look at the senders/implementors of #at:ifAbsentPut: for other ideas e.g. Dictionary>>#at:ifAbsentPut: > We can also do something like: > > myThing updateWithDictionary: aDictionary. > > and it will flip through the dictionary and assign values to the instance > variables. MyClass>>updateWithDictionary: aDictionary aDictionary keysAndValuesDo:[:key :value| self perform: key asMutator with: value]. > The above is very handy. > > I am currently creating a bunch of methods that populate my image with > real > objects, and could use these methods. > > My question is. Does a behavior like this already exist? If not, I'd like > to add these methods to my project (in monticello). They will be used with > several different objects, so should I add the methods to Object? > > I would imagine this is something I would want to use a great deal. How > would I go aobut making this something I could include easily in further > projects? > > I realize that the 'updateWithDictionary' is very inefficient, but this > will just be somethign that runs once, during data import, and never > again. > > I just want to make sure I am not doing anything whacky. > > Thanks! -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Object-select-or-create-methods-tp4799266p4799384.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Jan. 13, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Useful tools?

by Martin BÃ¤hr

Excerpts from stepharo's message of 2015-01-13 17:13:50 +0100: > Yes this is so true. You are 100% right > this is why I started to code a catalog extracted from configurationOf. > https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/PharoProjectCatalog/ but it > seems that recent changes broke it. > > Yes you are again right. The person developing Smalltalkhub left and > quit Smalltalk against all our expectations. who is maintaining the server now? is the code available? > Yes but if people do not see a value to document how can we do it. refuse to list packages that are not documented. > right now this is just a experiment. Two years ago I asked inria to pay > an engineer to help us solving this issue > but they thought that with one engineer he can do everything. woudln't this be a good project for summer of code (of the just now starting semester of code)? would you be willing to mentor such a project? greetings, martin. -- eKita - the online platform for your entire academic life -- chief engineer eKita.co pike programmer pike.lysator.liu.se caudium.net societyserver.org secretary beijinglug.org mentor fossasia.org foresight developer foresightlinux.org realss.com unix sysadmin Martin BÃ¤hr working in china http://societyserver.org/mbaehr/

Jan. 13, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Becoming proficient in Pharo

by Martin BÃ¤hr

Excerpts from nacho's message of 2015-01-13 15:13:41 +0100: > As I struggle, not without fun of course, to learn more about Pharo and its > frameworks and idea came to my mind. > We could put together some guidelines on how to become proficient in Pharo, > and eventually come to be a power user and / or a developer. > I read several of this recommendations on various list of other programming > languages. > Basically the idea is to have some sort of guide, with theoretical and > practical stuff. > For example: > *Beginners.* > *Intermediate* > *Advanced* > etc, etc, etc > > Like a road map to becoming a serious Pharo users and / or developer. I know one thing i noticed, is that such guides need to be topical. as a web developer i am not interested in GUI stuff, and if i have to go through tutorials that teach me how to build games than that's not very motivating. fortunately there are several web tutorials out there, but not all of them assume a pharo newbie, but expect me to learn pharo first (which brings me back to the game tutorial) one advantage pharo has is that new users need to learn the IDE and smalltalk at the same time. kind of like learning eclipse and java at the same time. i could learn eclipse using another language i already know, and i could learn java without using eclipse, but i can't really learn smalltalk without learning the IDE at the same time. so a new-user tutorial needs to explain every step in the IDE while teaching the language. a good example for a tutorial on the web-side is http://zn.stfx.eu/zn/build-and-deploy-1st-webapp/ it does not assume any prior knowledge about pharo, yet it is sufficiently high level that it will be interesting for an experienced developer (like me) even a person without programming experience will complete this tutorial successfully. i just had two students go through this tutorial during google code-in with more success than i had for other tutorials. one of them just started to learn programming, so throughout the tutorial he didn't really understand all of what he was doing there, but understanding comes from practice, and a few more tutorials and a good book or course on programming basics, and he'll get it. another aspect where this tutorial shines is, that it not only covers coding, but also deployment and packaging. the only thing missing is testing and debugging. in other words it introduces me to the major aspects i'd need to know to start building websites. > Just an idea, it will be collaborative. I volunteer to keep and maintain the > list updated in a place where it will be available to anyone but of course > can't contribute much besides doing that. as i am involved as mentor for code-in, semester of code and summer of code programs with a few smalltalk projects, i'll likely have more opportunities to test different approaches to get started, and hopefully will be able to provide more input. greetings, martin. -- eKita - the online platform for your entire academic life -- chief engineer eKita.co pike programmer pike.lysator.liu.se caudium.net societyserver.org secretary beijinglug.org mentor fossasia.org foresight developer foresightlinux.org realss.com unix sysadmin Martin BÃ¤hr working in china http://societyserver.org/mbaehr/

Jan. 13, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Becoming proficient in Pharo

by stepharo

Le 13/1/15 15:13, nacho a Ã©crit : > Hello, > As I struggle, not without fun of course, to learn more about Pharo and its > frameworks and idea came to my mind. > We could put together some guidelines on how to become proficient in Pharo, > and eventually come to be a power user and / or a developer. > I read several of this recommendations on various list of other programming > languages. This would be reallllllly great > Basically the idea is to have some sort of guide, with theoretical and > practical stuff. > For example: > *Beginners.* > Start by reading Pharo by Example for getting to know the system. > On Agile development read XXXX book or article. > On Object Oriented design and programming read this or that. > For practice do this exercises from this book or site. > For a background on Smalltalk read here or there > Some stuff on algorithms. > > *Intermediate* > Object Serialization read from here. > The VM from here.. > Building UIs > Basic Frameworks > Deep into Pharo > Pharo for the Enterprise > etc, etc, etc > > *Advanced* > etc, etc, etc > > Like a road map to becoming a serious Pharo users and / or developer. I know > this takes years but I think it would be very useful. Well at least for me. > I sometimes get lost when I read things like serializing, marshalling, > object memory, not to mention the internals of Pharo. > > Here is a link of something someone prepared for Haskell: > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1012573/getting-started-with-haskell > <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1012573/getting-started-with-haskell> > > Just an idea, it will be collaborative. I volunteer to keep and maintain the > list updated in a place where it will be available to anyone but of course > can't contribute much besides doing that. Super! > Cheers > Nacho > > > > > ----- > Nacho > Smalltalker apprentice. > Buenos Aires, Argentina. > -- > View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Becoming-proficient-in-Pharo-tp4799284.html > Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > >

Jan. 13, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Notification on GC of an object?

by Esteban Lorenzano

you also need to register the object for cleanup, in the WeakRegistry. (not on my machine, sorry I cannot put an example, but look around) Esteban > On 13 Jan 2015, at 11:55, Johan Fabry <jfabry(a)dcc.uchile.cl> wrote: > > > No, just putting the cleanup code in a finalize method does not seem to be working, sadly. > >> On Jan 13, 2015, at 11:18, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven(a)stfx.eu> wrote: >> >> Object>>#finalize ? >> >>> On 13 Jan 2015, at 15:13, Johan Fabry <jfabry(a)dcc.uchile.cl> wrote: >>> >>> Hi all, >>> >>> does anybody here have experience with hooking into the GC mechanism so that an object gets notified when it is collected? I have a setup here with auto generated classes that I would like to remove when their unique instance disappears. So Iâd like to let the GC figure out all the complicated tracking and inform me whenever such an object is collected, then Iâll zap the class as well. >>> >>> Experience reports, hints and tips are most welcome! >>> >>> ---> Save our in-boxes! http://emailcharter.org <--- >>> >>> Johan Fabry - http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry >>> PLEIAD lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile >>> >>> >> >> >> > > > > ---> Save our in-boxes! http://emailcharter.org <--- > > Johan Fabry - http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry > PLEIAD lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile > >

Jan. 13, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Useful tools?

by stepharo

We need a catalog of packages. We started to build such a catalog as a prototype. Now we are reimplementing everything. Stef Le 13/1/15 04:58, Laura Risani a Ã©crit : > Hi all, > > What are some tools / plug-ins/ projects / packages / frameworks > you find very useful or you use very frequently for development? > (please for each name it and state it's purpose) > I'm a newcomer to Pharo , so it hasn't to be something rare. > > > On the side... > I feel curious about how one gets to know about the existence of such > resources. Is there any sort of "resources index" (like a wiki page > with categories)? Besides books which can't be comprehensive because > of their nature. Such an index would be extremely handy in many ways. > Do you agree? Is it plausible, if it doesn't exist, to built it > collaboratively? > > It is a sad thing that useful tools go unnoticed when they could have > solved a problem you faced or eased your work if only you've known > about their existence. For what i've read on spread posts i feel like > there are many such tools. > > I had this experience of useful resource existence ignorance with > TilingWindowManager (LaurentLaffont) and with RBConfigurableFormatter > (by the way i can't figure out how to turn it on). Now i feel like > having a multiclipboard would be useful (i have one on my OS but > anyway...) > > Best, > Laura > > >

Jan. 13, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Useful tools?

by stepharo

> Two questions here: > > 1. The Configuration Browser is nice, but it still doesn't provide any > kind of description for the packages. I mean, looking at the list of > packages, I can probably guess what "Dependency Analyser" does, but I > have exactly zero chance in guessing what Epicea, Ephestos, Illiad, > Kendrick, Mandrill, Marina, Pastell, Pillar or Ston are about. Even a > single line description, displayed in a tooltip, would be a huge > improvement. Can this be added? Yes this is so true. You are 100% right this is why I started to code a catalog extracted from configurationOf. https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/PharoProjectCatalog/ but it seems that recent changes broke it. > 2. SmalltalkHub seems to have no way of browsing all available > packages. When I'm starting with Pharo and I don't know how some > library I need is called, I'm essentially out of luck: I need to do > much googling or ask on a mailing list, which both take more time than > it should. I see that " The following is a preview of the exploration > features of SmalltalkHub. More to come!" message is still there - I > remember it from a year or more back. Is this considered such a low > priority task, or is it just that nobody had enough time to work on > it? Yes you are again right. The person developing Smalltalkhub left and quit Smalltalk against all our expectations. > > By the way: there is no package description on many package pages. > Even squeaksource tended to have at least one sentence explaining the > purpose of a package (I think?). > >> There is a package named "Catalog", I don't know how many people is putting >> effort on it right now. I think it needs some love. >> > Ok, that's very nice, although the number of "Please project owner add > catalog description" and mention of "MetaRepoForPharo20" is a little > discouraging. Yes but if people do not see a value to document how can we do it. > One more question: besides asking on a mailing list, is there any > other way of learning about it? Is it linked from somewhere, or does > it need a lot of googling and luck (ie. googling for "pharo catalog > packages" doesn't return this link, at least on the first page of > results). right now this is just a experiment. Two years ago I asked inria to pay an engineer to help us solving this issue but they thought that with one engineer he can do everything. > > In general I have a feeling that discoverability of Pharo packages is > very bad right now. It's a serious problem for new users, and even to > a bit more advanced users who return to Pharo after some time of not > following announcements. I agree. >>> Now i feel like having a multiclipboard would be useful (i have one on my >>> OS but anyway...) >>> > There seems to be a support for this in Pharo 3.0: under right click > in an editor you have Paste and Paste... menu items. The latter > displays a thing that I think is supposed to be a list of recently > copied things. > > My problem, however, is that this doesn't work with OS clipboard (on > Linux). Ctrl+V and Right click->paste don't work at all with OS > clipboard (they do when copying things inside Pharo). X Window systems > have 2 clipboards: one normal and the other called "X selection" - it > seems that the latter is not checked at all, and normal clipboard is > being accessed by Clipboard>>clipboardText (when Alt+p on "Clipboard > default clipboardText"), but it still doesn't work with Ctrl+V. > Strange. > > Anyway, I have a very specific (side-)project in mind and I'm going to > try using Pharo for it, so you can expect quite a bit more questions > from me :) > > Best regards, > Piotr Klibert > >

Jan. 13, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Capturing a stream

by Ben Coman

So you mean 'rostopic echo' and 'rostopic pub' ? So its a publisher/subscriber model with 'echo' as the subscriber ? (I'll needs others to confirm this is possible but...) the way to go may be to fork 'rotopic echo' and leave it running, parsing its results into a queue that some other part of your program consumes. To simplify this to check feasibility, I'd start with a single shell script outputting text at intervals like this... "test.sh" for VARIABLE in 1 2 3 4 5 .. N do echo $VARIABLE sleep 2 done and in Pharo, assuming you can process the output stream asynchronously, every time you receive a newline, open an inspector showing the line just received. But sorry I don't know *PipeableOSProcess enough to know how.* *cheers -ben* On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 11:05 PM, Demian Schkolnik < demianschkolnik(a)gmail.com> wrote: > It is actually not a native linux command, but rather something belonging > to ROS (Robot Robot Operating System). I did not want to complicate the > question further.. The behaviour is as I described it. This echo command > sits still in the console where it was called, and waits. When some message > is send, then it just prints the message on screen and waits. The pub > method (also belonging to ROS) publishes a message and exits. > I tried Ben's solution (thanks!), but unfortunately stringVar remains nil. > I think the problem is we are assigning the output of the command to > stringVar, which is nothing, at the moment. > Any ideas? > Thank you all. > > El Tue Jan 13 2015 at 6:15:01, Ben Coman <btc(a)openinworld.com> escribiÃ³: > > I've never known 'echo' to wait for input, and haven't heard of this echo >> & pub combination. Do you have some link to a tutorial showing how they >> are used? >> >> However just wildly guessing, are you wanting to get output from a long >> running command without blocking the Pharo UI? >> In that case, what about... >> [ *stringVar := (PipeableOSProcess command: 'echo...') output ] >> fork. * >> *?* >> *cheers -ben* >> >> On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 9:18 AM, Demian Schkolnik < >> demianschkolnik(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Hello everyone. >>> >>> I have the following question. I have a specific 'echo ...' command, >>> which I send to the linux console via " OSProcess command:'echo ... ' ". >>> This echo command, when executed on the native linux console, stands by >>> until it receives some message. >>> Following this, I have to execute a 'pub...' command, which gives some >>> information that the echo command will print on screen. On linux, you run >>> 'echo..' on a terminal and 'pub...' on another. >>> My objective here is to capture the output of echo into a smalltalk >>> variable for later use. >>> Normally, if a console command prints something immediately to screen, I >>> use >>> *(PipeableOSProcess command:'some command') output.* >>> >>> It is here a little different though, since this command will not print >>> something immediately to screen. I want to do something like this, where >>> the final output of 'echo..' stays in stringVar. >>> >>> *stringVar := (PipeableOSProcess command: 'echo...') output. * >>> *(Delay forSeconds:3) wait.* >>> *(OSProcess command: 'pub... ').* >>> *(Delay forSeconds:3) wait.* >>> >>> Thank you all. >>> >>> >>> >>> >>

Jan. 13, 2015