January 2023 - Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Re: Creating tiny Pharo images

by erik.stel＠gmail.com

Hi all.\ \ I added a 'dynamic' image to the TinyBootstrap repo. It is a tiny image containing a pre-installed code loader. This code loader allows you to load additional classes and methods and (optionally) save this in the image. Code (in the form of a class method) can be executed from the command line. Once the image has the required content and functions as expected, it can be 'fused' in which case the code loader is removed from the image and only the defined functionality remains. To allow code to be installed from a regular Pharo 10 image, a small TinyTools repo is available which allows generation of code files. It also contains a small 'Inspector' class which simply prints out all classes (and optionally methods) which are present in the image. Installing this class is explained in the TinyTools readme.\ \ The encoder/decoder combi used is an adapted version of the encoder/decoder in CodeParadise which are used to send code and objects between browser and application server. \ \ Have fun Smalltalking to tiny images! \ [https://github.com/ErikOnBike/TinyTools](https://github.com/ErikOnBike/Tiny… "https://github.com/ErikOnBike/TinyTools")\ [https://github.com/ErikOnBike/TinyBootstrap/blob/main/README.md#dynamic-ima… "https://github.com/ErikOnBike/TinyBootstrap/blob/main/README.md#dynamic-ima…")

Jan. 15, 2023

Re: New to Pharo: Some questions

by Juan Cruz

Thanks, Sebastian for pointing to these libraries. For sure I will take a look at them! Best, Juan P. Cruz ________________________________ From: Sebastian Jordan Montano <sebastian.jordan(a)inria.fr> Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2023 9:13 AM To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> Subject: [Pharo-users] Re: New to Pharo: Some questions Hola Juan, Good to hear that you are interested in Pharo. The equivalent of Matplotlib is Roassal. You can check this video that we did (7min) of using Roassal for making visualizations for football data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOn9jVGa83c :) For data mining we have some algorithms in pharo-ai https://github.com/pharo-ai/wiki (wiki not updated at 100%) we also have some other machine learning stuffs. And we also have PolyMath : https://github.com/PolyMathOrg/PolyMath for scientific computations :) Regards, Sebastian Jordan ________________________________ De: "Juan Cruz" <juan.crux(a)outlook.com> Ã: "pharo-users" <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> EnvoyÃ©: Dimanche 15 Janvier 2023 01:10:34 Objet: [Pharo-users] New to Pharo: Some questions Hello, I hope everyone is doing well. I am new to Pharo but not to programming. I have a background in Python, and Javascript mostly. I mostly use Python due to the data, plotting, and math libraries. But after toying a little with Pharo, the language I came to appreciate its beauty of it and how expressive the language is. I was wondering if there are libraries equivalent to Matplotlib, Pandas, Numpy, etc. I mostly apply Python to finance -in particular to quantitative finance. I read somewhere that top investment banks use Smalltalk as their secret weapon, so I'm sure that there are some users that have some insights to share on this subject. Thanks to all and all the best for this 2023. Greetings Juan P. Cruz

Jan. 15, 2023

Re: New to Pharo: Some questions

by Juan Cruz

Hi, Thanks for your response. The size of datasets is not an issue, but my intention is not to bridge to Python. The reason behind the question is that (and sorry for those who love it) I think Python is an ugly language. It's very powerful due to its libraries: Yes. But as a language, I find it ugly and not very expressive. Besides, the fact that indentation has syntax meaning is really annoying. I tried Haskell, beautiful. Also Closure and Ruby. Love those. But Smalltalk caught my attention as I read in different sources that it was actively used in the financial industry, so I figure out that there were some advanced libraries out there...Probably they exist and are proprietary or secret haha. Thanks so much I will keep toying with Pharo, these days have been really fun. It is really fun to code in Pharo...and easy!! No need to set up environments, select editors, plugins, or debuggers..itÂ´s all there! Have a great Sunday Juan P. Cruz ________________________________ From: Jupiter Jones <jupiter.jones(a)mail.com> Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2023 3:20 AM To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> Subject: [Pharo-users] Re: New to Pharo: Some questions This may seem a little over simplistic, but the basics of what NumPy and Pandas offer can be achieved with the standard Smalltalk collection hierarchy. If your data fits in memory, then Pharo will handle the job. If not, then GemStone may do the trick. That said, thereâs a bunch of quite specialised stuff in those libraries, some of which is not trivial to implement. Or you may have gigantic existing datasets that you want to leverage. So you can always call the python libraries directly from Smalltalk using the PythonBridge [1]. Itâs been a long time since Iâve used it, so hopefully someone else can let you know if itâs still well maintained. There are a bunch of options for plotting. Maybe start by checking out Roassal [2]. You may even want to check out Glamorous Toolkit [3]. It may change your life ;) [1] https://objectprofile.github.io/PythonBridge/ [2] http://agilevisualization.com [3] https://gtoolkit.com On 15 Jan 2023, at 12:10 pm, Juan Cruz <juan.crux(a)outlook.com> wrote: Hello, I hope everyone is doing well. I am new to Pharo but not to programming. I have a background in Python, and Javascript mostly. I mostly use Python due to the data, plotting, and math libraries. But after toying a little with Pharo, the language I came to appreciate its beauty of it and how expressive the language is. I was wondering if there are libraries equivalent to Matplotlib, Pandas, Numpy, etc. I mostly apply Python to finance -in particular to quantitative finance. I read somewhere that top investment banks use Smalltalk as their secret weapon, so I'm sure that there are some users that have some insights to share on this subject. Thanks to all and all the best for this 2023. Greetings Juan P. Cruz

Jan. 15, 2023

Re: Causal profiling

by Sebastian Jordan Montano

Hello Mayuresh, As you said, in Pharo we don't have an implementation of a casual profiler at the moments. I don't know if someone will implement one in a near future. We have other profilers in Pharo: MessageTally and AndreasProfiler, both already in the image, are profilers that use sampling to get an estimated execution time for each method. Now we are working on a prototype of a memory profiler that we are going to release soon. Regards, Sebastian Jordan ----- Mail original ----- > De: "mayuresh(a)kathe.in via Pharo-users" <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> > Ã: "pharo-users" <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> > Cc: mayuresh(a)kathe.in > EnvoyÃ©: Dimanche 15 Janvier 2023 07:28:57 > Objet: [Pharo-users] Causal profiling > People here might have heard about the work of Prof Emery Berger on the causal > profiling technology. > Here's a paper presenting Coz, a causal profiler. > https://www.sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2015/current/2015-Monterey/printa… > > They have also release a profiler for Python using the same technology. > It is called Scalene: https://github.com/plasma-umass/scalene > > In case Pharo does not have such a profiler, maybe an expert could work on it? > > Best, > > ~Mayuresh

Jan. 15, 2023

Re: New to Pharo: Some questions

by Sebastian Jordan Montano

Hola Juan, Good to hear that you are interested in Pharo. The equivalent of Matplotlib is Roassal. You can check this video that we did (7min) of using Roassal for making visualizations for football data: [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOn9jVGa83c | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOn9jVGa83c ] :) For data mining we have some algorithms in pharo-ai [ https://github.com/pharo-ai/wiki | https://github.com/pharo-ai/wiki ] (wiki not updated at 100%) we also have some other machine learning stuffs. And we also have PolyMath : [ https://github.com/PolyMathOrg/PolyMath | https://github.com/PolyMathOrg/PolyMath ] for scientific computations :) Regards, Sebastian Jordan > De: "Juan Cruz" <juan.crux(a)outlook.com> > Ã: "pharo-users" <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> > EnvoyÃ©: Dimanche 15 Janvier 2023 01:10:34 > Objet: [Pharo-users] New to Pharo: Some questions > Hello, > I hope everyone is doing well. I am new to Pharo but not to programming. I have > a background in Python, and Javascript mostly. I mostly use Python due to the > data, plotting, and math libraries. > But after toying a little with Pharo, the language I came to appreciate its > beauty of it and how expressive the language is. > I was wondering if there are libraries equivalent to Matplotlib, Pandas, Numpy, > etc. I mostly apply Python to finance -in particular to quantitative finance. > I read somewhere that top investment banks use Smalltalk as their secret weapon, > so I'm sure that there are some users that have some insights to share on this > subject. > Thanks to all and all the best for this 2023. > Greetings > Juan P. Cruz

Jan. 15, 2023

Re: Sacrilegeous question : what are compelling use cases for Pharo

by TomaÅ¾ Turk

Hi Mayuresh, I think that the choice of what programming language one needs to learn or use depends today from the goals that you have - and these goals are not only tied to specifiic business projects that you (might) pursue but also career and self-enrichment missions. Years ago we had programmers who did their entire career by knowing and using only one language, however this is nowadays almost impossible, in general. As others already nicely put, Pharo and Smalltalk are, also in my own expeirence, the most beautiful and productive programming languages and environments. What would be the type of use cases which would be exemplary for Pharo? Well, I find Pharo to be a general programming language in its true meaning. You can grasp the diversity of what can be done by just looking at this list https://github.com/pharo-open-documentation/awesome-pharo. You can go close to the machine with uFFI and be very "declarative" with Glorp and similar packages. You'd like to do the data mining? No problem, except that everybody talks about Python and R. As MIS professor, I'm interested in new technologies, old technolgies in new settings, always looking for the best ways to do research about and to teach modern concepts, also challenging myself with real, "production" cases from the field. Once I learnt the Smalltalk way, the challenges for me with Pharo were mostly the following: - For a specific project, you sooner or later bump into a missing functionality in some package or other. Here, it's true that you can relatively easy see the inner structures of these packages and add the functionality that you need. The challenge here is grasping the architecture model and development patterns that the original contrubutors and the community already "engraved" into the package, trying to understand it and to follow the same patterns - i.e. to participate in a constructive manner. My case: PharoWin32 and PharoCOM <https://github.com/tesonep/pharo-com>, I had to add the functionality that I needed to work on PharoADO <https://github.com/eftomi/PharoADO>. - There is a constant lag of documentation publishing activities which cannot follow the actual development; typical examples that I stumbled across are Pharo Spec2 book (but it can be "replaced" by excellent Spec Handbook <https://github.com/pharo-spec/Spec/blob/Pharo11/spec2.md#SpStyleClass>), the second one the deeper settings of Seaside framework that I needed for production environment. For these challenges, you can always count on really helpful community, however it is time consuming and eats away the positive side of productivity gains that are brought by the language itself. So, if you need some occupation, not necessarily one from which you would demand financial returns as you put, I suggest that you choose a couple of small projects just to try it out and see what happens. Pharo is a heavy addition to one's self-enrichment in the sense of not learning the tools but learning the concepts and "the big picture". Nice examples are the book Learning Object-Oriented Programming, Design and TDD <http://books.pharo.org/> and Pharo MOOC <https://mooc.pharo.org/>. If you pursue into more serious projects (research or productionwise), the community would be grateful. Best wishes, Tomaz

Jan. 15, 2023

Re: Sacrilegeous question : what are compelling use cases for Pharo

by Stewart MacLean

Hi Mayuresh, Thanks for sharing your background. My advice would be to simply download it and "suck it and see". I've got twenty years on you and have spent my whole career working with computers (punched cards anyone?). I still get a buzz out of programming in Smalltalk. The reason it is such a joy is due to the ultimate simplicity of the grammar of the language. It fits on one page: http://chronos-st.blogspot.com/2007/12/smalltalk-in-one-page.html. And also that it is "Turtles all the way down" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down) Well mostly, but then there's access to C libraries via the FFI. In other development environments, you're mostly stuck with what you've got. With Smalltalk, you can dig under the hood. For Pharo, this is just as well, as some parts of it are a bit flakey. You mentioned Iceberg. I have had nothing but trouble with it and it's fair to say put me off using Git with Pharo. Other things are an absolute joy - check out Roassal for example. One of the highest quality pieces of code I've come across in my extensive career. Speaking of which, it has come to an end and what am I doing in my retirement? - working on a project that I plan on sending out into the real world! This has its challenges in Pharo, and this is where other platforms excel and are designed for (along with substantial financial backing), but I believe it is doable in Pharo. Hopefully it will be a "real world" use case! All the best with whatever path you choose... Cheers, Stewart On Sun, Jan 15, 2023 at 7:11 PM mayuresh(a)kathe.in via Pharo-users < pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> wrote: > Hello, > > In response to my email below, I received 5 interesting responses. I thank > those people for writing-in. > > Here is my take on what I've understood and why I am still hesitant to go > along. > My comments on those responses are further below, but, at the moment, let > me explain my situation. > > I am a 46 year-old who has been programming computers since the age of 16. > I used to be a highly sought-after programmer till the year 2000, when due > to circumstances beyond my control, my life and career got destroyed > completely. > In fact, I was so highly valued, that in spite of me being from India, I > was pursued by Verizon US. > I am now confined to my home (mostly) and I have very little to do, in the > past 12 years I have not programmed anything beyond a basic prime-number > tester and a fibonacci-sequence generator in C. > I am getting my life back in order and I need some occupation, though, not > necessarily one from which I would demand financial returns. > I have been dilly-dallying on a decision, primarily because I am unable to > take a call on whether to pursue my love for the low-level (x64 assembler + > Forth) or the extremely high-level (work involving reasoning using symbolic > inference) using a Smalltalk (either Squeak or Pharo). > > The above is not meant to elicit sympathy, but has been tacked-in just to > give potential advisers an idea about my state. > > Onward to my take on the responses I received to my first email. > > As Noury Bouraqadi and Stephane Ducasse mentioned: > It's not about what you can do, but it's about how you do it. > I'd say, that is the basic problem with all Smalltalk aficionados. > The whole environment is such a joy to work with that it is addictive, to > the extent that developers forget that it is the "what you can do" which is > of utmost importance. > > Jupiter Jones email provided the most amount of real-world use-cases. > Though, I am interested in understanding how to use Pharo as the > development tool to be able to release code via GemStone Smalltalk. > Is it so that Seaside runs identically on Pharo as well as GemStone > Smalltalk? > So, in a sense, Seaside would to Smalltalk, what "Ruby on Rails" is to > Ruby. > > Tim Mackinnon is very correct in observing that relative to C# and Swift, > Smalltalk (and hence Pharo) is very compact, simple and approachable. > Though, I did not understand his statement about conditional logic > becoming easier to understand after working especially with Smalltalk. > Would he care to elaborate? > Also, on Tim's allusion to Lisp being a cousin, well, Smalltalkers had > better acknowledge the fact that most Lispers "look down" upon Smalltalk > and do not spare any opportunity to berate its users/developers (this is > from personal experience). > > Along those lines, I would also like to get an explanation from Jupiter > Jones' for "how do you do an if/then?" which as he states leads to a > "mind-blown" moment. > > Thank you, > > ~Mayuresh > > On Saturday, January 14, 2023 01:31 PM IST, "mayuresh(a)kathe.in via > Pharo-users" <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > This isn't a mail intended to troll this community. > > > > I am genuinely curious about what would be the type of use cases which > would be exemplary for Pharo? > > > > Now-a-days, anything one could have accomplished solely with Smalltalk > (and hence Pharo) can be accomplished with a number of modern programming > languages and their associated frameworks, e.g. Google's Dart with Flutter, > Apple Swift with SwiftUI, Microsoft's C# with WinUI. > > And such languages and their associated frameworks are built from the > ground-up for a particular platform, while Pharo does not have any such > targets, which usually renders graphical applications built using Pharo to > "look like" aliens. > > > > What does stand-out regarding Smalltalk (and hence Pharo) is the > superior developer experience furnished as a result of the true object > system combined with a full graphical environment. > > In addition to that, Pharo, specifically, provides advanced tools like > Git integration, etc. > > > > But, are these things all that there are to be considered enough for > highlighting the full inherent power of Pharo? > > > > Again, apologies if anyone found the subject line as well as the message > body to be troll-ish. That has not been the intent. > > > > Kind regards, > > > > ~Mayuresh >

Jan. 15, 2023

Causal profiling

by mayuresh＠kathe.in

People here might have heard about the work of Prof Emery Berger on the causal profiling technology. Here's a paper presenting Coz, a causal profiler. https://www.sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2015/current/2015-Monterey/printa… They have also release a profiler for Python using the same technology. It is called Scalene: https://github.com/plasma-umass/scalene In case Pharo does not have such a profiler, maybe an expert could work on it? Best, ~Mayuresh

Jan. 15, 2023

Re: Sacrilegeous question : what are compelling use cases for Pharo

by Jupiter Jones

> Along those lines, I would also like to get an explanation from Jupiter Jones' for "how do you do an if/then?" which as he states leads to a "mind-blown" moment. The âmind blownâ comes from a first look at methods in the classes True and False to see how boolean logic is implemented. For many beginners, it seems so foreign that it takes a moment to realise just how simple and clean the implementation is. It opens their mind to new ways of writing code, and gives them a beautiful example of polymorphism. With your prior experience, you may not feel the same awe :) > Though, I am interested in understanding how to use Pharo as the development tool to be able to release code via GemStone Smalltalk. That whole world is kinda in a state of flux right now. But you can check out https://gemtalksystems.com/small-business/gsdevkit/ > Is it so that Seaside runs identically on Pharo as well as GemStone Smalltalk? For the most part Seaside pretty much runs identically on all its platforms. But itâs because GemStone is a server smalltalk, and as such doesnât have a native interface beyond a terminal. > So, in a sense, Seaside would to Smalltalk, what "Ruby on Rails" is to Ruby. Exactly.

Jan. 15, 2023

Re: New to Pharo: Some questions

by Jupiter Jones

This may seem a little over simplistic, but the basics of what NumPy and Pandas offer can be achieved with the standard Smalltalk collection hierarchy. If your data fits in memory, then Pharo will handle the job. If not, then GemStone may do the trick. That said, thereâs a bunch of quite specialised stuff in those libraries, some of which is not trivial to implement. Or you may have gigantic existing datasets that you want to leverage. So you can always call the python libraries directly from Smalltalk using the PythonBridge [1]. Itâs been a long time since Iâve used it, so hopefully someone else can let you know if itâs still well maintained. There are a bunch of options for plotting. Maybe start by checking out Roassal [2]. You may even want to check out Glamorous Toolkit [3]. It may change your life ;) [1] https://objectprofile.github.io/PythonBridge/ [2] http://agilevisualization.com <http://agilevisualization.com/> [3] https://gtoolkit.com <https://gtoolkit.com/> > On 15 Jan 2023, at 12:10 pm, Juan Cruz <juan.crux(a)outlook.com> wrote: > > Hello, > I hope everyone is doing well. I am new to Pharo but not to programming. I have a background in Python, and Javascript mostly. I mostly use Python due to the data, plotting, and math libraries. > But after toying a little with Pharo, the language I came to appreciate its beauty of it and how expressive the language is. > I was wondering if there are libraries equivalent to Matplotlib, Pandas, Numpy, etc. I mostly apply Python to finance -in particular to quantitative finance. > I read somewhere that top investment banks use Smalltalk as their secret weapon, so I'm sure that there are some users that have some insights to share on this subject. > Thanks to all and all the best for this 2023. > Greetings > Juan P. Cruz

Jan. 15, 2023