May 2019 - Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

GSoC 2019 Introduction
by Smiljana Knezev May 10, 2019

May 10, 2019

Hello everyone, I am a final year undergraduate student of Information Technologies in Novi Sad, Serbia. I first heard about Pharo about a year ago when professor Stephane Ducasse gave a guest lecture at our Faculty. I thought I was familiar with Object Oriented Programming, having been learning Java, but it was the first time I heard branching in OO is a sign of bad design. I was drawn to Pharo because of it's simplicity and elegance. This Tuesday I found out I was accepted for GSoC program for New Collections for Pharo project and I'm pretty excited about it. You can read about proposal here: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#4973054243897344 It will focus on documenting, refactoring and testing existing collections and migrating them to Containers library. Also some new collections like: SimpleTrees, B-Trees, AVL Trees, QuadTrees, OcTrees, ... will be developed Final part would be about research and development specialized/advanced data structures like: Immutable Queues, Immutable Lists, Immutable bidirectional maps,Threaded binary trees ... I would appreciate your feedback about the proposal. Should I change something? Maybe add or focus on some additional data structures? Other candidate from Serbia, Nina Medic and I discussed about writing a blog together for our weekly posts. It can be found here: https://smiljanaknezev.github.io/blog/?fbclid=IwAR2vC-N38wlPGY42ijokv67Anqd… It will be further customized and ready until Sunday. Also I have setup a twitter account to promote our blog posts and keep in touch with community. You can find me with @KnezevSmiljana . If you have any additional tips/tricks about making this GSoC project successful, I would like to hear about them. Looking forward to hearing from you. Best regards, Smiljana

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Visit Tokyo from 27 June to 5 of July
by ducasse May 4, 2019

May 4, 2019

Dear Pharoers/Smalltalkers from Japan (and other countries) I will visit (mainly) Tokyo from 27 of June to 5th of July 2019. I will give several talks and one is scheduled to the Smalltalk User group (Oda Tomohiro is organising it). I will give some talks to researchers and companies. Iâm really excited to meet people. Do not hesitate to contact me so that we can plan extra meetings. I really want to see what you are doing and how to support the community. Stef

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Explaining Spec2 and why Bloc is on the roadmap
by ducasse May 3, 2019

May 3, 2019

Dear Pharoers We would like to explain what is Spec 2.0 and how Bloc is on the Pharo roadmap. Spec is a way to support a way to express and reuse application interaction logic. Spec was first developed by Benjamin van Ryseghem and others while supervised by StÃ©phane Ducasse. Over the years we cleaned Spec, but we never took the time to really revisit it, and Spec was never stressed outside the scope of Pharo tools (even if there is some people who used it in their projects, this was not the general case). There was a need to deeply rethink the way we express and reuse interaction application logic. Spec 2.0 revisits fundamentally Spec. The consortium wants to acknowledge the strong financial support of Schmidt in this new development. Here is a list of points we are working on to support companies to build modern applications with Pharo. - adding support for many widgets and at the same time improving existing widgets such as fasttable - adds much better layouts (we will deprecate the interpreter design) - introducing a new way to architecture an application: Spec20 introduces the notion of application to better handle resources and window flow - revisiting the internal logic of Spec (to remove useless parts and enhance the ones that works) - adding many tests In addition we want that Spec 2.0 is not tight anymore with Morphic. Why? Because we want to make sure that: - companies can deploy desktop applications - we can reuse all the tools logic of Pharo with new widgets sets such as Brick (widgets on top of Bloc) without having to rewrite everything. This is why Spec2.0 can optionally render using Gtk3.0. It also means that in the future we can have native widgets. Now that Bloc/Brick is finally reaching a point where it can be tried and eventually adopted, we want to make sure the transition to it will not force us to throw away the tools we developed last ten years. We think that Bloc needs some effort to clean and structure it and Spec2.0 gives the time to let Bloc and Brick mature. Also, we want to make sure that in the future we will be able to adopt other backends in case we decide it (Remember new now is old tomorrow and while Bloc/Brick is new and modern, it will not remain new and modern forever). Brick needs to be ready for Pharo consumption, and to make it possible we need to move the image to converge. With Spec 2.0, in future versions we will just need to define a new backend to get all our tools working. The Pharo Board

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Creating a dictionary from a list of associations
by Konrad Hinsen May 3, 2019

May 3, 2019

Hi everyone, About twice a week I start looking for a straightforward way to turn a list of associations into a dictionary, spend a while searching, and give up, ending up with a messy explicit loop. Example: | words lengths | words := #('abc' 'defg'). lengths := Dictionary new. words do: [ :each | lengths at: each put: each size ]. lengths Is there really no way to this with less code? I'd expect the following to work: | words lengths | words := #('abc' 'defg'). lengths := Dictionary withAll: (words collect: [ :each | each -> each size ]). but it looks like Dictionary>>#withAll: was specifically designed to make this impossible (because with the default implementation in Collection it would work). Konrad.

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Re: [Pharo-users] [Pharo-dev] Explaining Spec2 and why Bloc is on the roadmap
by Eric Gade May 2, 2019

May 2, 2019

Stef, Exciting news all around. Is this s good opportunity to revisit theming? I made a good attempt to wrap my head around themes about a year ago or so, but it's quite complex. If now's not (understandably) the time, how will themes work with this new multiple-backend approach? On Thu, May 2, 2019 at 11:45 AM Alexandre Bergel via Pharo-users < pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> wrote: > Hi Stef, > > Thanks for this email. Spec 2 really looks great. > It is also great to foresee an integration of Bloc/Brick in Pharo. > > Cheers, > Alexandre > > > On May 2, 2019, at 5:27 AM, ducasse <stepharo(a)netcourrier.com> wrote: > > > > Dear Pharoers > > > > We would like to explain what is Spec 2.0 and how Bloc is on the Pharo > roadmap. > > > > Spec is a way to support a way to express and reuse application > interaction logic. > > Spec was first developed by Benjamin van Ryseghem and others while > supervised > > by StÃ©phane Ducasse. > > Over the years we cleaned Spec, but we never took the time to really > revisit it, and Spec > > was never stressed outside the scope of Pharo tools (even if there is > some people who > > used it in their projects, this was not the general case). There was a > need to deeply rethink > > the way we express and reuse interaction application logic. > > > > Spec 2.0 revisits fundamentally Spec. The consortium wants to > acknowledge the strong financial > > support of Schmidt in this new development. Here is a list of points we > are working on to support companies > > to build modern applications with Pharo. > > > > - adding support for many widgets and at the same time improving > existing widgets such as fasttable > > - adds much better layouts (we will deprecate the interpreter > design) > > - introducing a new way to architecture an application: > > Spec20 introduces the notion of application to better handle > resources and window flow > > - revisiting the internal logic of Spec (to remove useless parts > and enhance the ones that works) > > - adding many tests > > > > In addition we want that Spec 2.0 is not tight anymore with Morphic. > > Why? Because we want to make sure that: > > - companies can deploy desktop applications > > - we can reuse all the tools logic of Pharo with new widgets sets > such as Brick (widgets on top of Bloc) > > without having to rewrite everything. > > > > This is why Spec2.0 can optionally render using Gtk3.0. It also means > that in the future we can have native widgets. > > > > Now that Bloc/Brick is finally reaching a point where it can be tried > and eventually adopted, we want to > > make sure the transition to it will not force us to throw away the tools > we developed last ten years. > > We think that Bloc needs some effort to clean and structure it and > Spec2.0 gives the time to let Bloc and Brick > > mature. Also, we want to make sure that in the future we will be able to > adopt other backends in case we > > decide it (Remember new now is old tomorrow and while Bloc/Brick is new > and modern, it will not remain > > new and modern forever). > > > > Brick needs to be ready for Pharo consumption, and to make it possible > we need to move the image to converge. > > With Spec 2.0, in future versions we will just need to define a new > backend to get all our tools working. > > > > The Pharo Board > > > > > > > > > -- Eric

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[ANN] Pharo Consortium New Academic Member: ISCLab
by Marcus Denker May 2, 2019

May 2, 2019

The Pharo Consortium is very happy to announce that ISCLab has joined the Consortium as an Academic Member. About - ISCLab: Intelligent Software Construction Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, FCFM, University of Chile. The ISCLab develops methodologies to build software systems that are both resource efficient (CPU, memory, energy) and adequate with modern software development techniques. We push further the knowledge frontier of Software Engineering with innovative methodologies, rigorous empirical evaluations, and valuable software artifacts. https://isclab.dcc.uchile.cl - Pharo Consortium: http://consortium.pharo.org The goal of the Pharo Consortium is to allow companies and institutions to support the ongoing development and future of Pharo. Individuals can support Pharo via the Pharo Association: http://association.pharo.org

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Getting example images - https://picsum.photos
by Sven Van Caekenberghe May 2, 2019

May 2, 2019

Hi, This is a cool service: https://picsum.photos - it gives you example images (pictures/photos). Here is how you can use this from a standard Pharo image (no pun intended). ZnEasy getJpeg: 'https://picsum.photos/512'. ImageReadWriter formFromStream: (ZnClient new systemPolicy; url: 'https://picsum.photos/640/480?grayscale'; accept: ZnMimeType imagePng; get) readStream. Sven

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Why doesn't the VM command line help show the useful image commands anymore?
by Tim Mackinnon May 1, 2019

May 1, 2019

I was asked a question about starting pharo exercism from the command line on Arch linux - seems the Pharo.image file isnât being found (but it was installed with AUR, which I am unfamiliar with). Anyway - I tried using the command line on OSX ( I noticed they had used pharo, and not pharo-ui â which I never understood: why is it not pharo for ui and pharo-cmd for terminal, as it burns most people?) - and typed âpharo âhelpâ, and you get an impressive long list of commands - however it doesnât show you the useful Image commands anymore? So you would never know to use âpharo Pharo.image âlistâ. A while back it showed you that - but its now gone which seems a shame? I also notice at the bottom of the list, its says the the image name defaults to Pharo.image - however I havenât noticed that works at all - you have to specify an image, so thats a bit misleading. Tim

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Runaway scrolling in Pharo 7 on Ubuntu 18.04
by Pierce Ng May 1, 2019

May 1, 2019

Anyone encountering runaway scrolling in Pharo 7 on Ubuntu 18.04-based systems? In Pharo 7.0.3, click Help > Glamour Example Browser. When the browser comes up, click Fast List Outline Simple on the left pane. In the right pane's Browser tab, click inside the scrollbar's gutter, i.e., not on the end arrows nor on the positional brick. The list doesn't stop scrolling until it reaches the bottomest entry. In the code browser, it happens in the bottom code pane but not in the other panes. This happens on my laptop running Xubuntu 18.04 and also in VirtualBox VMs running Xubuntu 18.04 and Lubuntu 18.04 on my Mac. It does _not_ happen on the Xubuntu 18.04 laptop when doing the same in a 60546 image. It does also happen running a current Pharo 8 snapshot image; no Glamour Example browser built in but I get the same scrollbar behaviour in a Form inspector window. It does _not_ happen when doing the same in a 7.0.3 image in a VirtualBox VM running a LinuxMint version that is based on Xubuntu 16.04. Pierce

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