February 2016 - Pharo-users

Using GTSpotter how do I find an implementor of #accept ?
by Paul DeBruicker Feb. 20, 2016

Feb. 20, 2016

when I hit shift+enter and type 'accept' I get things that are not #accept, e.g. #accept: and AbstractAcceptor. If I add a space after accept it doesn't help. What do I not understand? Thanks Paul

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libUSB binding Pharo
by FranÃ§ois Stephany Feb. 20, 2016

Feb. 20, 2016

Hi, Is there a libusb[1] binding for Pharo 4/5? After a quick google search, I've seen that Udo Schneider has started one last year. Any idea on its status? If not, would it be a nice summer job for a student (my company can pay for it...)? Cheers, Francois [1]: http://libusb.org/

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GSOC 2016 we are done
by Serge Stinckwich Feb. 20, 2016

Feb. 20, 2016

Dear all, the GSOC website is close now. Thank to the incredible work of Peter and Uko, we were able to submitting our application for GSOC 2016. Thank you all the people who provide insights and advices for the application. You can still update the topics list by providing pull requests on github: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-project-proposals/blob/master/Topics… The 2016 Mentor Organizations will be announced on February 29, 2016 on Google website: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/ Thank you. Regards, -- Serge Stinckwich UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC) Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/

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Who is using Pillar and for what
by Damien Cassou Feb. 20, 2016

Feb. 20, 2016

For my CV, I need to know who is using the stuff I'm doing. If you use Pillar, could you please tell me in which context (e.g., which company, open-source project) and what you use it for (e.g., what kind of document)? I don't need long paragraphs, just give me the keywords please. -- Damien Cassou http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without losing enthusiasm." --Winston Churchill

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GSOC 2016
by Serge Stinckwich Feb. 20, 2016

Feb. 20, 2016

Dear pharoers, this year Pharo consortium (and community) is going to take part in the Google Summer of Code event[1] as a standalone organization. This is an opportunity to promote Pharo, get some job done and have students paid. Currently we are at the most important stage as we are preparing the organization application, and hoping that we will be accepted and granted decent amount of project slots. Everyone can help with application by submitting ideas for student projects. I reuse the list of the last year : https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-project-proposals/blob/master/Topics… It is in STON format, and result is being generated at: http://gsoc.pharo.org/ Please add (or update) your ideas following the format of existing projects and open a pull request with them (you will need a github account). Preferably submit ideas with possible mentors, but if none are available at the moment ideas without mentors are also welcome. The template to submit projects is : PharoTopic new title: 'The name of your project; contact: 'email address'; supervisors: 'Supervisors names'; keywords: 'keywords separated by spaces; context: 'a description of the context of the project'; goal: 'description of the goal'; level: 'Beginner or Intermediate or Advanced'; yourself. We will need a lot of projects/idea before February 19th 2016, the deadline for applying to GSOC 2016. Do not hesitate to ask me questions. If you don't know how to edit the list, please send your project description following the template to me. [1] https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/ Regards, -- Serge Stinckwich UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC) Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/

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Customised auto-completion to give priority to specific packages
by Dimitris Chloupis Feb. 20, 2016

Feb. 20, 2016

As a next step for my project Ephestos , I want to mess with auto-completion. My goal is for auto completion to give priority to the Ephestos packages. This way the Ephestos users will get recommended first auto completion of Ephestos classes and methods, I will then add a line to separate those from the rest of Pharo recommendations. I could customise this further to accomodate for any package inside pharo thus making the autocompletion prioritise your packages and classes/methods. Is there any interest for something like that ? If there is then I could make it into a separate Pharo project and make it easy to install via Package Browser (Pharo 5 configuration browser) . If there is no interest then I can keep it as part of my project and not do the extra work for separating the code. I also welcome any advice and recommendation on how to achieve this by people who already hacked auto completion. I already study the NECompletion package so I have a general idea but so far have not figure out how to priorotise recommendations.

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World lastKeystroke and openInWorld: aPasteUpMorph
by Markus Schlager Feb. 20, 2016

Feb. 20, 2016

Hi, I'm using pharo to teach smalltalk as first 'real' programming language at school. With older versions of pharo I was glad that my pupils could track keystrokes so easily by evaluating World lastKeystroke. With Pharo3.0/4.0 this only returns '<down>' independently of any keys I'm typing. f := PasteUpMorph new openInWorld. f takeKeyBoardFocus. f lastKeystroke. Is returning the empty string. Hence, my question: Is lastKeystroke broken, or how is it meant to be used now? Second problem: In older versions of pharo this would work: f := PasteUpMorph new openInWorld. b := EllipseMorph new. b openInWorld: f. But with Pharo 3.0/4.0 the last line raises an error: MessageNotUnderstood: PasteUpMorph>>startSteppingSubmorphsOf With f := WorldMorph new openInWorld. b := EllipseMorph new. b openInWorld: f. pharo freezes. So: How is openInWorld: meant to be used? Markus

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REEF examples
by recursive68＠gmail.com Feb. 19, 2016

Feb. 19, 2016

Hi, I'm trying to use REEF but can only find a few limited examples which aren't helping really. Does anyone know for example how I would update a RETextField value when a REButton is clicked ? I found this example someone answered to a the query I had but it doesn't work: REForm subclass: #MyForm instanceVariableNames: 'textFieldContents' classVariableNames: '' poolDictionaries: '' category: 'ReefSample1-View'. textFieldContents ^textFieldContents textFieldContents: aString textFieldContents := aString initializeContents self add: (RETextField new on: #textFieldContents of: self). self add: (REButton new label: 'Try me!'; callback: [ self triggerThenDo: [ self inform: self textFieldContents ]]). All it does is generate a dialog box when the button is clicked. I don't know if inform: has usage since that was written. Thanks

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Line end convention in method source
by Norbert Hartl Feb. 19, 2016

Feb. 19, 2016

I had a strange effect using a method as storage. I had a list of strings that I compiled into a method. The strings were delimited by Character lf. I created this on a Mac. Saving the source and opening the same code on a linux machine changed the line endings from lf to cr. IMHO this is a bug because I think that the content of a method should be unchanged in that case. Or are there any other reasons why this is the way it is? thanks, Norbert

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GSOC 2016 Application update
by Serge Stinckwich Feb. 18, 2016

Feb. 18, 2016

Dear all, just a quick update to GSOC application of Pharo this year - We have enough topics I guess. I already send a reminder on the various mailing-list. List of topics here: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-project-proposals/blob/master/Topics… We have to generate the html from the topics list and put the result on the gsoc.pharo,org website. I ask Uko to have a look to this, but I don't want to loose to much time on this. I was wondering if we should transform the list as a Markdown document on github just to keep it simple. - Finish the 2016 Application and Organization profile on Google website. The questions are a little bit different from 2015 and we should complete them. Please find below the answers to the questions right now. I add in parenthesis, the number of words of each answers and the maximum allowed. Please us to refine our answers. We need to wrote "guidance for students". Thank you. ========================================================================== Why does your org want to participate in Google Summer of Code? (898/1000) Supporting open-source projects is one of the most important objectives of the Pharo community. Participating at GSoC will increase the visibility of Pharo project efforts, thus favoring interactions with other communities. We are also interested in providing interesting projects to students allowing them to learn and have a fun job for the summer. We expect also to bring more people into our community. That's very interesting as the Pharo community is trying to be innovation-driven and more open minded than the Smalltalk community from which we have evolved. We want people from other communities to join ours and we are also interested in what is happening outside and to share experiences or ideas. Fortunately for us, dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, among others, enjoy increasing popularity. This is an excellent opportunity to join, show and learn from and with other communities. ========================================================================== How many potential mentors have agreed to mentor this year? 11-15 ========================================================================== How will you keep mentors engaged with their students? (668/1000) We chose mentors from people who are long time in our community and have proven to be reliable. Usually we try to match mentors with projects that are important for themselves. This means that the mentor has an own interest in the project that the student doing it. Also we try to ensure that there is a co-mentor for every project who can replace the main mentor if needed. Also it is very important for us to keep a good record and expand the community, and in previous years we even managed to organize our own "summer code" programs for a couple of students, so in the worst case we will find a replacement from the core part of the community, or the board itself. ========================================================================== How will you help your students stay on schedule to complete their projects? (886/1000) As mentioned before we've already organized our own small "summer code" programs, as usually we have more interested students than the fundings that we can spend for them. However we acknowledge that maintaining student's motivation is very important. We are a very open and friendly community, and we encourage the students to take part on the mailing list discussions from the beginning of their projects. There is a specific pharo-users mailing-list more suitable for beginners than the pharo-dev mailing-list. Usually students get feedback and requests from the beginning of their projects, and they have people interested in the prototypes as soon as they are ready. From our experience having real users for the project serves as the best motivation. Also our mentors try to maintain a constructive and friendly discussion to ensure that the student enjoys working on the project. ========================================================================== How will you get your students involved in your community during GSoC? (608/1000) As mentioned above we encourage students to announce their status on the mailing list as well as discuss questions on our Slack channel. We also encourage them to write blogs about their project experience to both promote themselves and give others an opportunity to familiarize with the project more and share ideas between students. We are organizing PharoDays every year (this year in Belgium, website: http://pharodays2016.pharo.org) and we participate to the ESUG (European Smalltalk User Group) conference in the end of each summer and plan to invite the students of the best projects to present there. ========================================================================== Has your org been accepted as a mentoring org in Google Summer of Code before? Yes ========================================================================== Which years did your org participate in GSoC? - 2012 - 2010 - 2008 - 2007 ========================================================================== What is your success/fail rate per year? - 2012: 10 projects pass / 3 fail - 2010: 6 projects pass / 0 fail - 2008: 5 projects pass / 0 fail - 2007: 5 projects pass / 0 fail ========================================================================== If your org has applied for GSoC before but not been accepted, select the years: - 2015 - 2014 - 2013 ========================================================================== What year was your project started? 2008 ========================================================================== Short description of Pharo (166/180) Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and IDE. We innovate every part of the development experience to come up with the best way to work with software. ========================================================================== Long description of Pharo (1401/2000) Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming languagea and IDE. Pharo's goal is to minify the gap between the state of your mind and the functionality of your application. Whether you are writing code, debugging it, inspecting an object, hacking the runtime or tweaking the IDE there should be nothing that stops you from engaging the action with ease and grace. We work both on improving Pharo itself and on developing end user applications in Pharo. Below you will see the highlights of most prominent Pharo features. ### Simple & powerful language No constructors, no types declaration, no interfaces, no primitive types. Yet a powerful and elegant language with a full syntax fitting in one postcard! Pharo is objects and messages all the way down. ### Feel a live environment Feel the joy of having immediate feedback at any moment of your development: Developing, testing, debugging. Even in production environments, you will never be stuck in compiling and deploying steps again! ### Amazing debugging experience The Pharo environment includes a debugger unlike anything you've seen before. It allows you to step through code, restart the execution of methods, create methods on the fly, and much more! ### Pharo is yours Pharo is made by an incredible community, with more than 80 contributors for the last revision of the platform and hundreds of people contributing constantly with frameworks and libraries. ========================================================================== Guidance for students on how to apply to your organization. Should include any prerequisites or requirements. You may wish to include a template or tips for their proposals. (0/1500) TBD ========================================================================== - Regards, -- Serge Stinckwich UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC) Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/

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