October 2017 - Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Re: [Pharo-users] "Building-With versus Building-on"

by Thierry Goubier

Hi Andrew, Stephane, thanks for the read. It was interesting, albeit a bit confusing at times. I do like your evaluation of the thesis. 2017-10-12 23:10 GMT+02:00 Stephane Ducasse <stepharo.self(a)gmail.com>: > Thanks Andrew I read it fast and I will reread it. It is really > interesting to me because I never took the time to understand "worse > is better". > Reading through "worse is better", and the follow-up "worse is better is worse" by the same author, I'm not sure there is much to understand ;) Apart if you want to study how a misunderstood quote can become a driving force in software development... Thierry > > On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 5:50 PM, Andrew Glynn <aglynn42(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > https://medium.com/@dasein42/building-with-versus-building- > on-c51aa3034c71 > > > > > > This is an article not specifically about Pharo, rather on the state of > the > > industry > > in general and how it got that way, but positing Pharo as a way to learn > > building-on rather than building-with, where in the latter case on > > every project you start at essentially the same place. > > > > > > As a result it does put in front of people a fair amount of info on > Pharo, > > and challenges them to try it. > > > > > > cheers > > > > Andrew Glynn > >

Oct. 13, 2017

Re: [Pharo-users] "Building-With versus Building-on"

by Dimitris Chloupis

What is a VA Java ? and a VA C++ ? Call me an idiot or insane but I am in favor of combiding languages, though I only have heard of COBRA never used it. I am a lawyer by profession, I know fellow lawyers still using DOS and QBasic databases and yes under windows ...... sadly very common for businesses here. Ah the pleasures of technology but nothing comes close to the pleasure of rejecting it. On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 12:49 AM Andrew Glynn <aglynn42(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I know about personalization being a lot of work, particularly with > Eclipse. I copied the text out of the âsummaryâ page in About Eclipse into > Kate, and it was 1233 lines long, lol. > > > > I was one of two team leads on what was probably the most complex > application Iâve worked on, using VA Java and VA C++ with CORBA to exchange > objects (the need to combine both was due to legacy issues). Siemens now > owns the application, which was successful enough to bankrupt its closest > competitor, but the binary jars in the latest version are still dated 2002, > and every addition has been made via .the WS* API we included, which if I > remember correctly, uses version 1.x of WebSphere. Iâm a bit surprised it > still runs at all tbh, but its security must be horrible by now. > > > > Eclipseâs only saving grace is EMF/CDO, and a few projects built on them, > IMHO. > > > > Sent from Mail <https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for > Windows 10 > > > > *From: *Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.alios(a)gmail.com> > *Sent: *Thursday, October 12, 2017 2:05 PM > *To: *Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> > *Subject: *Re: [Pharo-users] "Building-With versus Building-on" > > > > It's a mentality issue, modern programming languages provide the material > necessary to create innovative environments but their communities just > simply does not care. A language designer may introduce a feature in a > language that is super useful. Still people may not use it. > > > > And let's face it even with Pharo nothing beats a personalized > environment, of course personalisation is a lot of work. Hence why people > avoid it. > > > > Essentially boiling down to cooking your own food instead of getting it > from a shop. When you begin to learn how to cook , its kinda sucks, but the > more you cook the better it tastes. Of course it takes time to get there > and hence why so few people cook. > > > > Eclispe , which I will disagree with your that is not the worst IDE, > started as a smalltalk IDE and then it got Eclipsed. I am sure those people > had a "build on" environment , still it got messy. We can blame porting to > Java, but can we really blame Java for the mess that is called > "Eclipse".... ehhhh.... nope. > > > > I once saw a youtube video about a musician using windows sounds (the > standard sounds we all know of) to make a very nice music piece. He did > all that using multiple instances of windows media player. Just pause > reading think about this for a minute. That's the real essence of creativity > > > > Use something very limited and come up with something amazing. The > software industry is not about creativity for the most part. On the other > hand I that work with 3d its amazing how fast super cool new technologies > pop around like mushrooms. Every year we have massive improvements in > libraries and tools. But the coding for 3d graphics is all about creativity > , artists are not very forgiving for ugly GUI, limited features and > innovation stagnation. Artists want to be inspired by the tools they use. > But then that's the creativity realm. Creativity pays the bills in this > case, lack of it , game is not fun, rendering or animation is not fun, you > can lose millions. > > > > Of course in the creativity realm , there is too much innovation and > unless you keep up you are kicked out the door, yesterday. Which brings > down to the problem of complexity and how you deal with it. And I don't > mean about bad complexity , aka web dev, I am talking about good > complexity. Features you cannot ignore because other will use before you > and you are left behind etc. > > > > > > On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 7:13 PM Peter Fisk <peter.fisk(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Thanks for posting this. > > > > It is one of the best descriptions of the state of the software industry > that I have seen. > > > > > > On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 11:50 AM, Andrew Glynn <aglynn42(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > https://medium.com/@dasein42/building-with-versus-building-on-c51aa3034c71 > > > > This is an article not *specifically* about Pharo, rather on the state of the industry > in general and how it got that way, but positing Pharo as a way to learn > building-*on* rather than building-*with*, where in the latter case on > every project you start at essentially the same place. > > > > As a result it does put in front of people a fair amount of info on Pharo, > and challenges them to try it. > > > > cheers > > Andrew Glynn > > > > >

Oct. 13, 2017

Re: [Pharo-users] FYI about Pharo MOOC

by Dimitris Chloupis

I could help with the Greek subtitles but I am fundamental against the idea of learning anything code wise in a non english language. It does much more damage than good. Congrats for making it so accessible and all your hard work :) On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 9:42 AM Gour <gour(a)atmarama.com> wrote: > On Thu, 12 Oct 2017 21:59:53 +0200 > Stephane Ducasse > <stepharo.self(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > I'm about to release the en versions. > > you can find them unofficially on http://www.stephaneducasse.eu/MOOC/ > > I've downloaded one and can I safelyassume that the 'new' videos are same > content as the old ones jsut with the English voice dubbed over? > > In that case, I'd prefer to use/watch old ones with the subtitles. > > > Sincerely, > Gour > > -- > He who is satisfied with gain which comes of its own accord, who > is free from duality and does not envy, who is steady in both > success and failure, is never entangled, although performing actions. > > > >

Oct. 13, 2017

Re: [Pharo-users] Namespaces (was Re: Behold Pharo: The Modern Smalltalk)

by Dimitris Chloupis

Personally I dont get it, we find the path to bootstrap the pharo image clear and we cannot see the path to namespaces ? it makes zero sense to me Plus what you say, countless and countless of implementation of namespaces out there. And again what you say about perfection. If C++ can improve, If C++ can dream of namespaces planning the introduction of modules(in future version) in replacement (not removal) of his awful header file format.... I think we got the excuse to be confident we can come up with something decent. We develop a freaking IDE for crying out loud. No it wont be a walk in the park, no it wont get done in one or next version, and no it cannot be an individual our outside effort. But we have the community super qualified to do it. On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 8:51 AM Ben Coman <btc(a)openinworld.com> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 8:52 PM, Sean P. DeNigris <sean(a)clipperadams.com> > wrote: > >> horrido wrote >> > Having separate namespaces would be really good. >> > VisualWorks has them. Why not Pharo? >> >> I can't remember ever hearing disagreement on this subject. It seems the >> only questions have been: 1) how to do them *right*, > > > The default position would be leveraging someone else's experience, so > this begs the question, what is wrong in namespace implementations in VW, > Gemstone, Squeak (as our immediate neighbours, then plus Dolphin, > SmalltalkX, other languages) > Are there been any research papers around comparing these? > > I found the "Pharo on Gemstone VM" talk impressive. The "develop on Pharo > deploy on Gemstone" philosophy seems like a nice synergy for Pharo's > commercial future. So a naive approach would be to do namespaces just like > Gemstone. Maybe its not the best, but would it be "good enough" -- > perfection being the enemy of done and all that jazz. > > cheers -ben > > >> and 2) where they fall on the endless prioritized todo list >> >

Oct. 13, 2017

Re: [Pharo-users] Behold Pharo: The Modern Smalltalk

by Dimitris Chloupis

> That is a familiar path, but still an obstacle for people to get over in > trying Pharo - i.e. its a barrier of entry. I've previously referred to > this article by JoelOnSoftware, but to pull out a key part... "Think of > these barriers as an obstacle course that people have to run before you can > count them as your customers. If you start out with a field of 1000 > runners, about half of them will trip on the tires; half of the survivors > wonât be strong enough to jump the wall; half of those survivors will fall > off the rope ladder into the mud, and so on, until only 1 or 2 people > actually overcome all the hurdles. With 8 or 9 barriers, everybody will > have one non-negotiable deal killer. This calculus means that eliminating > barriers to switching is the most important thing you have to do if you > want to take over an existing market, because eliminating just one barrier > will likely double your sales. Eliminate two barriers, and youâll double > your sales again." > > ****WARNING LONG POST AHEAD**** There numerous reason why this kind of thinking is fundamental flawed, if not completely wrong 1) How you get people to run in this race ? 2) What makes you think that people participating in the race doing to get first or even finish ? 3) How you are certain that those barriers are not the very reason people participate ? The fundamental problem is that if you base your assumption that people are motivated on avoidance of pain, this is a very popular argument by the way, you going to be severely disapointed. From the very first fact that there is a 90% chance that right now that you use almost 100% of your time one of the worst software to be ever created. Microsoft Windows. Of course you can throw claims to me that peope use Windows because that is what's popular and widely available, but then so is MacOS is by far the easiest to use OS out there. When you pit Windows vs Macos a such taboo subject , fuel to so many flame wars, there is one thing that both sides agree on and that is that MacOS is far easier to use , perdiod. The rest of the debate which OS is the best is up in the air and frankly not the point of my argument. The fact is , we love pain, we love barriers, we love doors that slam into our face. We love challange. But only if we find it interesting. Of course Windows is not the only example (C/C++ , Java , Web dev, computer games and the list is just endless)of the machocistic nature of human beings. I dont need to look far, my own story about how I started coding is more than enough . I am going to ramble about my initiation to the realm of coding , so feel free to ignore the rest of my post but what the hell here we go. >From an early age , no idea when, I was exposed to the idea of the computer. Never used one before or saw on in person other than what I saw in the TV I asked my father to get me one and he agreed on the ground that I wont use it just to play games but to learn how to code. My father had no idea what coding is, had no idea what technology is, to this day he hates technology and he refuses to learn even how to close a window. None , friend , relative or random stranger I knew used a computer. So I got this weird thing called computer and turned it on, of course motivated to play games like any other kind in my age, I was 9 years old at the time, december 1988. But I had a sense of honor even from that age so I had to keep my promise. So I did and I was fascinated by it, to the degree that I was coding as much I was playing games. Problem is that it was mainly masochistic venture. I had one book and one book alone, none that had any clue how to show how to turn this thing on and of course no internet, no schools, no magazines I could afford to buy or even know where to buy them . So in 3 years, I made nothing special, only tiny fragments of code and I was still struggling with basic concept like looping. Yes, looping. But I already was doing things that a greek kid did not suppose to do and I did not even fit the geek stereotype at the time (not that the term existed at the time, I still does not exist in my language), I had tons of friends, I was anything but shy , I was the craziest nosiest kid suffering from the annoying syndrom of hyperactivity and with very lmited attention span. I was the absolute worst candidate to learn how to code, yet I did . Sort of. Then my father decided to send me, after me begging on my knees, on a prrivate school, that just opened near our neighborhood for learning. At the time time I only still had the same computer, Amstrad CPC 6128 and knew the very basics of Locomotive Basic which was used also by the computer as a bash like language for its OS. I went 3 years, the first year I did ok, an average student even though I had by far the most experience than other kids we learned GWBASIC. The second year I did terrible, we learned DBASE and the third we learned CLIPPER and blow any other student completely away, I was the only to graduate with 99.8% and our teacher was super strict on the matter of grades. But I wanted more. So I went and learned C++ and assembly because why not and when I told my teacher that, he was looking me with his eye wide open, took me quite a lenghy discussion to convince him that this was true. The reason why the first year I did average was that it was too easy. I was already familiar with Basic , sure I was struggling with basic concepts when I started but under the wing of the teacher (he was a great teacher, professional coder and highly skilled at helping you understand even the most difficult concepts) and full access to multiple books in few months became a walk in the park. The second year was a disaster, partly because our teacher decided to hire a relative of his to teach us DBASE and the guy was a moron wasting his time with telling jokes. The truth is that I did not like and still dont like database coding. Clipper I fall in love with it at the time because still a database orientated language but our teacher tought us, his relative got sacked as soon as he learned that he sucked, that happened one year after because none of the kids had the courage to go tell him and it was probably a parent the told him and did so well I was even offered to make a database for a considerable amount of money. Said no. Again not interested. My story is nothing special, I heard it in slightly diffirent versions by countless others in a similar situation however my point is not to brag, because lets face it I was just merely learning languages and not doing any serious coding , my point is that the drive behind it was the pain. Was the obstacles. Was the challange. Pharo for me is also the same story. At the time I was coding in Python, super easy, got the job done, had no intention learning another language because why bother when they all look the same and they would have been much less powerful than Python. I was super happy with Python and still is one of my favorite language as you all know. Then I saw people on forums rambling about this weird language called Lisp , I was interested, google a tutorial , saw the parentheses , said "hell no!" and carried on coding in python. Then even more people claiming that it was so amazing, that it can cure cancer and make you super sexy. I always wanted to be super sexy so I said, ok lets give this a serious try. So I bought a book called "Land of Lisp" very fun to read, terrible teaching material, messy and all over the place. Community was terrible too (Common Lisp), at least some people, rude, snobs, evangelistic and plain stupid. A minority of people but still enough to ruin your day.Then I was introduced to emacs, another super painful experience, thoroughly enjoyed and one day I mentioned how cool it would be if one could combine the simplicity of Lisp with emacs but via a GUI IDE and without elisp which was hog slow. People immediately recommended Squeak, I though they were messing with me because none would pick such a ridiculous name for a language. Looked to me like a toy language for kids and then it hit my face like a train. Pain, pain and more pain. But it was well worth, I was completely blown away from the elegance of Smalltalk. The learning curve of Smalltalk and Lisp are plain insane. Made learningh DOS Assembly a walk in the park in comparison. But frankly thats half of the fun. Many obstacles, many challanges. And there lies my point that an obstacle is a good thing when it becomes an interesting challange. You have to have at least a degree of masochism to learn how to code in any language. Of course the question is what makes an interesting challange and welcome to the abyss that is called "human brain". None knows and we are not anywhere close in finding out. What we know is that documentation is super important , whether you are a masochist or not, you need it to progress. Problems is that documentation is hard to create and maintain, again masochism required. So we should not just worry about making it easier for people to reach documentation we should make it easier for people to maintain it. Because even masochism has its limits. Those limits are as far it is a pleasureable pain. So congratulations to anyone reading this long post , you already proven my point. Thus, let embrace the pain of Pharo and the pain of smalltalk and instead of trying to make it easy, boring and usual. Lets turn it to a challange, lets turn it to a painful yet pleasureable experience I think to that extend we in a very good path, I think Pharo is definetly a fun experience to use and learn. A huge plus also for Pharo is the community and how welcoming it is, we take for granted but my experience with Python was not the best either. I joined the IRC channel, other than having to endure the stupidity of "say lol 3 times and you are banned" , too many wars over languages and how superior Python is than anything else. Guido is god and blah blah blah... No thanks. People here are open minded, still "religious" about Smaltalk but they actually want to help , not to teach, actually help. I think we are a bit too obsessed on how to make Pharo popular, Smalltalkers suffer from this insecurity of the "failure" of the "best language of the world" not only to become popular but also to convince coders that "is not a a relic of the past". But we are fine, documentation is doing grear, Pharo is improving rapidly , the community is welcoming as ever. All we need is embrace our successes and our failures, reject the hype, consider the crticism and accept it or reject it and generally carry on doing what we all love. Improving Pharo. ;)

Oct. 13, 2017

Re: [Pharo-users] FYI about Pharo MOOC

by Gour

On Thu, 12 Oct 2017 21:59:53 +0200 Stephane Ducasse <stepharo.self(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I'm about to release the en versions. > you can find them unofficially on http://www.stephaneducasse.eu/MOOC/ I've downloaded one and can I safelyassume that the 'new' videos are same content as the old ones jsut with the English voice dubbed over? In that case, I'd prefer to use/watch old ones with the subtitles. Sincerely, Gour -- He who is satisfied with gain which comes of its own accord, who is free from duality and does not envy, who is steady in both success and failure, is never entangled, although performing actions.

Oct. 13, 2017

Re: [Pharo-users] FYI about Pharo MOOC

by Stephane Ducasse

Hello It would be super great :) the files are in the github repo https://github.com/SquareBracketAssociates/PharoMooc/tree/master/Subtitles Stef On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 1:25 AM, Ricardo Pacheco <ricardo.pacheco.roldan(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Hello Stephane, I can help with the Spanish subtitles. You can send me a file > with the text, if you have it. My french is basic so please send also the > English fil, to double check. > > > > -- > Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html >

Oct. 13, 2017

Namespaces (was Re: Behold Pharo: The Modern Smalltalk)

by Ben Coman

On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 8:52 PM, Sean P. DeNigris <sean(a)clipperadams.com> wrote: > horrido wrote > > Having separate namespaces would be really good. > > VisualWorks has them. Why not Pharo? > > I can't remember ever hearing disagreement on this subject. It seems the > only questions have been: 1) how to do them *right*, The default position would be leveraging someone else's experience, so this begs the question, what is wrong in namespace implementations in VW, Gemstone, Squeak (as our immediate neighbours, then plus Dolphin, SmalltalkX, other languages) Are there been any research papers around comparing these? I found the "Pharo on Gemstone VM" talk impressive. The "develop on Pharo deploy on Gemstone" philosophy seems like a nice synergy for Pharo's commercial future. So a naive approach would be to do namespaces just like Gemstone. Maybe its not the best, but would it be "good enough" -- perfection being the enemy of done and all that jazz. cheers -ben > and 2) where they fall on the endless prioritized todo list >

Oct. 13, 2017

Re: [Pharo-users] [Ann] PharoLauncher v1.0.1 released!

by Ben Coman

On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 3:43 PM, Christophe Demarey < christophe.demarey(a)inria.fr> wrote: > Hi Vitor, > > Le 11 oct. 2017 Ã 13:44, Vitor Medina Cruz <vitormcruz(a)gmail.com> a Ã©crit > : > > Hi Christophe, > > Yes, but: > > 1- I canât execute it if I donât have administrative rights > > ok. That the point I missed. > I think I will add a zip file with PharoLauncher for windows for user like > you not having admin rights. > Might this be a "portable" app, where downloaded images and VMs are stored next to the PharoLancher application, configured by a startup-setting file? Alternatively... searching around I found this... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18990418/nsis-require-admin-permission https://github.com/NSIS-Dev/Documentation/blob/master/Reference/RequestExec… Also, when PharoLauncher is installed by an administrator and later used by a standard user, I guess there may be problems with Pharo needing to write changes to a restricted location?? Maybe that can be dealt with by... when a new user runs PharoLauncher from the start menu, copy it to their user folder $LocalAppdata\Programs\PharoLauncher and run PharoLauncher from there where they have privilege to write? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31641818/install-application-files-to-s… btw, where are the NSIS source files accessible? Can they be dropped in the PharoLauncher git repo? HTH cheers -ben

Oct. 13, 2017

Re: [Pharo-users] Behold Pharo: The Modern Smalltalk

by Ben Coman

On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 10:39 PM, Offray Vladimir Luna CÃ¡rdenas < offray.luna(a)mutabit.com> wrote: > The more I use Pharo, the less I use web documentation. > That is a familiar path, but still an obstacle for people to get over in trying Pharo - i.e. its a barrier of entry. I've previously referred to this article by JoelOnSoftware, but to pull out a key part... "Think of these barriers as an obstacle course that people have to run before you can count them as your customers. If you start out with a field of 1000 runners, about half of them will trip on the tires; half of the survivors wonât be strong enough to jump the wall; half of those survivors will fall off the rope ladder into the mud, and so on, until only 1 or 2 people actually overcome all the hurdles. With 8 or 9 barriers, everybody will have one non-negotiable deal killer. This calculus means that eliminating barriers to switching is the most important thing you have to do if you want to take over an existing market, because eliminating just one barrier will likely double your sales. Eliminate two barriers, and youâll double your sales again." For example, Stef mentioned that the Pharo web docs were dropped because were't used much. But perhaps their value is not for regular use by the community, but more for outsiders evaluating Pharo, or newcomers transitioning from their old workflow to a Pharo one. In that case their value eliminating one barrier of entry is much greater than measured from the number of page hits. btw, What I like about Richards's articles is that... most of our community's articles are for people already using Pharo, even if only a newcomer of a few days working through an introductory tutorial. Richard's articles target outsiders and one of the side benefits for *me* is that it pulls in critical outside perspectives to remind me of the barriers-of-entry stopping people using Pharo. Take for instance the common angst people have against working in an Image in Smalltalk. There are some legitimate concerns with ending up in a state you can't recreate, which we are addressing this with the bootstrapping projects. But I think we might publicize this better to outsiders. For example... Mr Smith knows nothing about Smalltalk and takes an interest in Pharo. Smith discusses with colleague Jones who presents a poor opinion of the Smalltalk Image approach. So Smith never tries Pharo! Alternatively, if Smith has already read in an FAQ about this common argument and how we address it by our bootstrap process, he can inform Jones', and maybe now we've got two curious newcomers. cheers -ben

Oct. 13, 2017