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Re: [Pharo-users] [ Book Review ] Lauren Ipsum

by Bernat Romagosa

This book is a must read! I use many of its metaphors all the time when teaching! :) It just takes an afternoon to read it, don't miss it. 2015-01-15 16:28 GMT+01:00 Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven(a)stfx.eu>: > Every now and then you come across a book that is special. > > A couple that I remember are 'Structure and Interpretation of Computer > Programs' by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman for its high level of > abstraction over petty details and its breath of subjects, 'The Little > Schemer' by Daniel Friedman for its mind blowing Q&A style introduction to > recursive thinking or 'The Connection Machine' by Danny Hillis, a doctoral > thesis that read like a science fiction novel. > > Closer to Pharo, 'Smalltalk Best Practice Patters' by Kent Beck surprises > by being deceptively simple yet profound and by transcending the language > for general object design principles. 'A Mentoring Course on Smalltalk' by > Andres Valloud manages to bring across very advanced ideas mostly by > discussing the implementation of one or two relatively simple problems. > > So what about a (children's) book about computer science without any > (pseudo) code or math ? And make it fun too, please. > > 'Lauren Ipsum' by Carlos Bueno and Ytaelena Lopez [ > http://www.laurenipsum.org ] does just that. > > It is a story about a girl that is lost in some magic land and wants to > get home. Along the way the fundamental principles of computer science get > woven into the story - as if they were the most normal thing in the world > (which they are). > > I was smiling all the time, for all the little jokes and references, > although many of those will be lost on those that are not computer nerds. > Graph searching, reader writer problems, abstraction, heuristics, > networking, communication and so on are all part of the story. Beautiful. > > I read the e-book version in iBooks on my iPhone without any layout > problems. > > Recommended. > > Sven > > > -- > Sven Van Caekenberghe > Proudly supporting Pharo > http://pharo.org > http://association.pharo.org > http://consortium.pharo.org > > > > > > -- Bernat Romagosa.

Jan. 15, 2015

[ Book Review ] Lauren Ipsum

by Sven Van Caekenberghe

Every now and then you come across a book that is special. A couple that I remember are 'Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman for its high level of abstraction over petty details and its breath of subjects, 'The Little Schemer' by Daniel Friedman for its mind blowing Q&A style introduction to recursive thinking or 'The Connection Machine' by Danny Hillis, a doctoral thesis that read like a science fiction novel. Closer to Pharo, 'Smalltalk Best Practice Patters' by Kent Beck surprises by being deceptively simple yet profound and by transcending the language for general object design principles. 'A Mentoring Course on Smalltalk' by Andres Valloud manages to bring across very advanced ideas mostly by discussing the implementation of one or two relatively simple problems. So what about a (children's) book about computer science without any (pseudo) code or math ? And make it fun too, please. 'Lauren Ipsum' by Carlos Bueno and Ytaelena Lopez [ http://www.laurenipsum.org ] does just that. It is a story about a girl that is lost in some magic land and wants to get home. Along the way the fundamental principles of computer science get woven into the story - as if they were the most normal thing in the world (which they are). I was smiling all the time, for all the little jokes and references, although many of those will be lost on those that are not computer nerds. Graph searching, reader writer problems, abstraction, heuristics, networking, communication and so on are all part of the story. Beautiful. I read the e-book version in iBooks on my iPhone without any layout problems. Recommended. Sven -- Sven Van Caekenberghe Proudly supporting Pharo http://pharo.org http://association.pharo.org http://consortium.pharo.org

Jan. 15, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Becoming proficient in Pharo

by nacho

Master kilon, thank you very much. This is an excellent videcast. As always with your videos a lot of questions arise after watching them! I really appreciate you taking the time to put this togheter. Cheers nacho ----- Nacho Smalltalker apprentice. Buenos Aires, Argentina. -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Becoming-proficient-in-Pharo-tp4799284p4799717.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Jan. 15, 2015

Stackoverflow, was: [Pharo-dev] Could we keep Pharo-dev for Pharo-dev?

by Stephan Eggermont

Serge wrote: >Shall we move the discussion to pharo-users instead ? Yep. >I was not aware of that. Do you have recent examples about this behaviour ? The last closed question was fine. Flagging it just gets clueless moderator replies: "declined - The question really needs to be fleshed out. Including the code for the rectangle morph would help a lot." An earlier one was Command pattern in smalltalk [closed] (you might not be able to see that as it was deleted). Of the 10 most popular smalltalk questions, at least 8 would be closed using current moderation standards. There is not 1 question from last year amongst the 50 most popular questions. In the top 100 there are 2, and the most popular one is about Objective C. The most popular question from last year gets 7 votes. That means there are not enough smalltalkers on SO to be able to reopen questions. The gaming system basically values popularity of answers, not correctness. It reinforces majority choices. Phil wrote: >Traffic increases as a sign of traction/engagement and we want to silence things. Yeah sure. > >Put a tag in the title and filter on that. Some channels are more effective than others. Stackoverflow is not an effective channel. Ignoring it is not smart. Answer questions and point people to the mailing lists. Stephan

Jan. 15, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Making objects persistent

by sergio_101

Hi, all.. these are all ideas that make sense, and for the sake of any new people coming to pharo/smalltalk, i want to clarify just a little bit more what i am actually doing. i am setting up a new site that needs to have a bunch of data available at all times. something like.. products, product types, pricing.. not really, but you get the idea. i have a class that just buzzes through and creates the data from some external CSV files. this data will form the basis of the app.. very quickly this will be outdated.. but it will be a good place to start the app.. i plan on using gemstones as a data store when this goes live for real, but for now, i am just persisting data in the image, and will even do so on the proof site. when the site goes into production mode, i will set up gemstones. since this is all happening completely out of seaside, i don't want to tie this to seaside at all. there are a few of these objects being created insides a test case, but they disappear pretty quickly after the tests are run. i think what i am going to end up doing is creating a class variable that holds an array of these items. this should keep them available. I will let you know. Thanks! On Thu Jan 15 2015 at 4:52:30 AM Ben Coman <btc(a)openinworld.com> wrote: > Store the objects in an array in a class variable. > To delete, just nil the class variable. > > On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 3:44 PM, jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de < > jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de> wrote: > >> Sergio, >> >> I'D say you first need to define what you mean by "persistent" If all you >> need is to have them survive a Garbage Collection, you just need to make >> sure these objects are referenced by som eother objects. Depending on your >> use case, this can be Seaside Sessions, Global variables (probably the >> worst idea), TestCase subclasses or even a TestResource. >> >> If you want to persist them for longer, we are talking about storage of >> objects, which is another beast. What comes to mind are options like Fuel, >> STON, Json, Voyage/Mongo or Glorp with some Database - the choices are >> endless. >> >> Joachim >> >> >> Am 15.01.15 um 08:32 schrieb phil(a)highoctane.be: >> >> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 6:06 AM, sergio_101 <sergio.rrd(a)gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >>> I am building a seaside application, and am in the process of building >>> my models and unit tests. >>> >>> I have a few objects that build up my data by creating objects. >>> >>> when i run the data creation methods, everything is fine. immediately >>> afterward, since these objects to belong to anything, they are cleaned up >>> by garbage collection. >>> >>> >> >>> is there a way to create these objects so that they persist? >>> >> >> >> They should belong to your session if you want them to live for the >> session. >> >> Otherwise, I guess you can put them in a global var to make it >> available everywhere, or in >> >> GRObject>>application, session, or requestContext depending on how long >> you want them to live. >> >> >> >>> if this is possible, how would you go about deleting such a tenacious >>> object? >>> >> >> Session expiry for session vars. The other ones, standard Smalltalk >> way, replacing the reference with something else innocuous if you can't get >> rid of them the normal gc way. >> >> Like, x become: String new. (and not x become: nil, which would make >> nil become x...) >> >>> >>> thanks! >>> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- >> Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de <jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de> >> Fliederweg 1 http://www.objektfabrik.de >> D-71640 Ludwigsburg http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com >> Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1 >> >> >> >

Jan. 15, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] [Pharo-dev] InfoWorld on Redline Smalltalk

by Johan Fabry

I donât know the entire context of the discussion (iâm not following Pharo-dev, where this came from apparently.) But I would like to point out that it is wrong to think of Spec as an abandoned project! Spec is here to stay, and hopefully for a very long time. > On Jan 15, 2015, at 09:08, Esteban A. Maringolo <emaringolo(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > I wouldn't do a PR campaign mentioning VW's Pollock UI, Pharo's Spec or any other abandoned project whatsoever. ---> Save our in-boxes! http://emailcharter.org <--- Johan Fabry - http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry PLEIAD lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile

Jan. 15, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] [Pharo-dev] InfoWorld on Redline Smalltalk

by Esteban A. Maringolo

El ene 15, 2015 8:55 AM, "Sebastian Sastre" <sebastian(a)flowingconcept.com> escribiÃ³: > > >> On Jan 14, 2015, at 9:44 PM, Esteban A. Maringolo <emaringolo(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Shaking the hive can certainly have a positive outcome, but you can also get you bitten. :) > > > And whatâs the news on that? > > The world is full of people paralysed by fear. > > Scared people is not worth following (they are not going to invent any interesting future). > > The ones who dear to do different are way more interesting. > I totally agree with you. But the mentioned project was a viable option two years ago, when it was trying to get developer traction and the "runs on JVM" was a hyped feature (not to mention the bad experience almost everyone had with such things). Amber is, IMO, way more valuable and with a greater feature than Redline. And I never used any of them. I wouldn't do a PR campaign mentioning VW's Pollock UI, Pharo's Spec or any other abandoned project whatsoever. A different thing is a project of which you can expect to move at a slow pace, but uninterruptedly. Regards,

Jan. 15, 2015

InfoWorld on Redline Smalltalk

by Stephan Eggermont

continued from pharo-dev, please keep discussion here. The smalltalk on jvm situation is exactly like it shouldn't be. There are three implementations, not working together: - RTalk - Gravel - Redline The first two are driven by existing commercial smalltalk users coming from a platform that they feel is not sufficiently developing (different ones). This amount of fragmentation is ridiculous. Of course they have different priorities and needs, but it should be possible to share the work that all three feel they have to do. The result is that at least two of them move forward very slowly. Stephan

Jan. 15, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Making objects persistent

by Ben Coman

Store the objects in an array in a class variable. To delete, just nil the class variable. On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 3:44 PM, jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de < jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de> wrote: > Sergio, > > I'D say you first need to define what you mean by "persistent" If all you > need is to have them survive a Garbage Collection, you just need to make > sure these objects are referenced by som eother objects. Depending on your > use case, this can be Seaside Sessions, Global variables (probably the > worst idea), TestCase subclasses or even a TestResource. > > If you want to persist them for longer, we are talking about storage of > objects, which is another beast. What comes to mind are options like Fuel, > STON, Json, Voyage/Mongo or Glorp with some Database - the choices are > endless. > > Joachim > > > Am 15.01.15 um 08:32 schrieb phil(a)highoctane.be: > > On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 6:06 AM, sergio_101 <sergio.rrd(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> I am building a seaside application, and am in the process of building my >> models and unit tests. >> >> I have a few objects that build up my data by creating objects. >> >> when i run the data creation methods, everything is fine. immediately >> afterward, since these objects to belong to anything, they are cleaned up >> by garbage collection. >> >> > >> is there a way to create these objects so that they persist? >> > > > They should belong to your session if you want them to live for the > session. > > Otherwise, I guess you can put them in a global var to make it available > everywhere, or in > > GRObject>>application, session, or requestContext depending on how long > you want them to live. > > > >> if this is possible, how would you go about deleting such a tenacious >> object? >> > > Session expiry for session vars. The other ones, standard Smalltalk way, > replacing the reference with something else innocuous if you can't get rid > of them the normal gc way. > > Like, x become: String new. (and not x become: nil, which would make nil > become x...) > >> >> thanks! >> > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- > Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de <jtuchel(a)objektfabrik.de> > Fliederweg 1 http://www.objektfabrik.de > D-71640 Ludwigsburg http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com > Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1 > > >

Jan. 15, 2015

Re: [Pharo-users] Could we keep Pharo-dev for Pharo-dev?

by Norbert Hartl

To me it goes like that: - pharo-dev is used by people that discuss, develop, bug fix the pharo image itself - pharo-users is used by people that maybe just want to download pharo and work with it not interested in the detailed internal things - a pharo-dev person is very likely subscribed to pharo-users, too - a lot pharo-users persons are not subscribed to pharo-dev Now what information is interesting to people that want to use pharo? I'd say that new tools and new features of their environment are interesting things for them. So, I would put everything on pharo-users that a plain user of the environment might want to know off. Norbert > Am 15.01.2015 um 10:07 schrieb kilon alios <kilon.alios(a)gmail.com>: > > does that mean that announcing new pharo tools that are included in the standard pharo distribution should go to pharo-users ? > > On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 9:24 AM, stepharo <stepharo(a)free.fr <mailto:stepharo@free.fr>> wrote: > Hi guys > > I will start to be picky about the mails to which I reply or even read. > We should be more disciplined. Pharo-dev should be about Pharo-dev this is important > for our concentration. > I really like the other discussions but we should have them in Pharo-users. > I think that it makes sense. > > Stef > >

Jan. 15, 2015