- Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Thanks for Pharo
by Jimmie Houchin Oct. 20, 2015

Oct. 20, 2015

Sometimes conversations revolve around perceived deficiencies in Pharo. What Pharo is missing. Or what Pharo doesn't do as well as my previous language, my favorite language, my other language, etc... These conversations are necessary to understand where Pharo is and to provide understanding on where Pharo needs some work. However, not enough gets said sometimes for all the goodness Pharo already provides and thanks to all of those who have contributed over the years to Smalltalk/Pharo. I know sometimes we get stuck in the minutiae and lose the big picture. I just want to say thanks to all that have contributed to Pharo in big and small way. Thank you. A special thanks to Stef, Marcus and company who have been working hard on this all the way back when it was still Squeak. Who had a vision for a clean, empowering, business ready, vision fulfilling Smalltalk inspired tool we call Pharo. Thanks. And a thanks to Eliot and all who contribute on the VM side of things. Enabling us to have a nicely performing and stable vm to run the Pharo image. My apologies for not naming everyone who deserves thanks. I intend no offense to anyone not named, but also deserving. Your names are included in all the contributor documentation. Thanks. And while I am being thankful, which is a good habit for all of us to be in. Being thankful not only improves the spirits of those being thanked. But those of us who are grateful are the biggest beneficiaries. I want to take time to appreciate some things in Pharo that make us appreciate having a tool like Pharo and which distinguishes itself from other languages and environments. I think these things either distinguish themselves either in the relative uniqueness or in quality of their implementation. They are not necessarily distinguishing from other Smalltalks but from other non-Smalltalk languages. Superior persistent live object environment. This is the game changer and affects and enables all other benefits. """I'm not complaining. I know that there is a good chance that we break the system when improving it. I have no problem with that and I prefer a living system with some bugs for a while than a dead system with no bug""" Stef - Sept. 7, 2015 IDE, debugging and refactoring, all live, all the time. Because of the truly persistent live environment, there is no concept of shutdown, restart. We only know hibernate and resume. This is to use OS terms. For me this is an amazing boost to productivity. I can at any time save my image. Even close my saved image and resume exactly where I stopped. At any time, on any supported OS, on any machine. Powerful. There truly is no edit, compile, run cycle similar to other languages, even dynamically typed languages with REPLs. If I am not in Pharo, even if that language has an amazing notebook or repl available. It is nothing like coding in the live environment. The separation of editor and the compiler and/or application or VM makes development not as smooth and fluid. Even if I can enter and execute code in a notebook or repl to explore and learn in a version of a live environment. I still at some point have to leave my editing environment and write, edit and save my source code. And yes there are languages, editors, IDEs and tools that attempt to close the gap. But no, there still is a significant gap. The edited source code is the only thing that persists. Everything that gets executed in the repl or notebook is transient and will go away. MIT, equivalent or better licensed ecosystem. For me these are game changers. They set a standard by which I view any other programming experience. Thusly all other programming experience falls far short. Whenever I (we) experience a present weakness in Pharo. Remember the above. Not only does Pharo have these distinguishing factors. I do not know of any language or environment which even has a culture or worldview of programming which seeks to bring these features to their favored language or tools. Every time I have to restart my computer I think, Smalltalk solved this decades ago. Ugh!!! Where is my Pharo machine. :) If you have any Pharo distinctives that you appreciate and would like to share. Reply and let us know. What I mean by distinctive is something that Pharo (or Smalltalk) has that is either not in other languages or is in general significantly inferior. Especially those that other languages have no vision to ever have. It just isn't a part of who they are. If we keep these things before us as we work through the tedious work of cleaning the image, repairing fail attempts at various things. Or anything that may be a frustration for the moment, but is temporary. Remember what we gain and are blessed with having, that we would lose any where else. Or at a minimum have a far inferior substitute. And look forward to what we will have as these things become complete. The future is ours. Let's enjoy the journey. Just some thoughts in my head I wanted to let out. This is reminder to me. If any of you are blessed and inspired, that is a plus. Thanks and Shalom. Jimmie

10 16

Voting for removing Seaside chapter from UPBE
by Dimitris Chloupis Oct. 20, 2015

Oct. 20, 2015

I already mentioned this in Github issues but here is my take on this I vote for the complete removal of the Seaside chapter for several reasons a) Its not a begineer orientated chapter as is the focus of this book b) its not general purpose as is the focus of this book c) far harder to keep this updated constantly which again is the focus of this book, since not many of us use seaside d) It already has its own book and its own documentation which we can easily refer to. e) Its not even part of Pharo standard distribution So I vote for the complete removal of this chapter so we have one less thing to worry about updating and since its my personal opinion that it does not fit the general character of this book. I would like your thoughts on this since its a big change.

3 4

Question when reading UPBE
by å°æ©æ© Oct. 20, 2015

Oct. 20, 2015

Hi, I'm a newcomer in Pharo and start to learn how to use Pharo. In page 42 of UPBE(Vesion:2015-10-17 ), I don't know where I write the constant methods and UPBE didn't tell me in which pane to type them. Could you tell me ? Andy Zhu

5 8

CiteZen and Pharo 5 / Pharo4 tests
by Peter UhnÃ¡k Oct. 19, 2015

Oct. 19, 2015

Hi, I wanted to use CiteZen, but there's no Pharo 5 version (wouldn't even load), so I tried Pharo 4 instead but the tests are not passing: all CZBibTest fail on MessageNotUnderstood: Metaclass>>allMethodsInCategory: is this known problem? Do I need to use a very specific build of Pharo 4? Thanks, Peter

3 9

loading GToolkit in Pharo 3.0 no longer works
by phil＠highoctane.be Oct. 18, 2015

Oct. 18, 2015

It used to but the configurations have been really messed up. e.g. I get "Bricks" mentions... Phil

2 1

Live interaction with SQLite data from Pharo
by Offray Vladimir Luna CÃ¡rdenas Oct. 18, 2015

Oct. 18, 2015

Hi, I have followed the short tutorials[1][2] on SQLite and Pharo and my connection is working properly. But I miss some liveliness on how interact with data base, particularly after seeing the video from Doru at [3], where near to min 38 he shows a connection with a Posgresql data base which after ran on the playground results in a nice vire with a tab for putting the SQL code and another for inspecting the results in a table format, even for adding data live. Is this functionality only available on Postgres or can also be enabled on a connection for SQLite and if yes, how can it be done? [1] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/pipermail/pharo-project/2010-October/033564.ht… [2] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~PharoExtras/NBSQLite3 [3] https://vimeo.com/97315968 Thanks, Offray

1 2

Pharo and Fossil
by Hilaire Oct. 18, 2015

Oct. 18, 2015

Hello, Following the recent post on SQLite, I came to read about Fossil[1]. Are any of you using Fossil for Pharo project? If so what is your required set up, script, etc.? Thanks Hilaire [1] http://www.fossil-scm.org -- Dr. Geo http://drgeo.eu http://google.com/+DrgeoEu

1 0

Pharo messaging
by Torsten Bergmann Oct. 18, 2015

Oct. 18, 2015

Hi, Lots of message apps in use today (WhatsApp, Telegram, ...) on phones and mobile devices. There is "WhatsAPI" [1] - but my understanding is that it was closed for legal/security reasons. There are other solutions like Telegram that also have an API [2]. What options do we have in Pharo these days: - to send messages from Pharo to a phone - receive messages from an app to control a Pharo image remotely from a phone or communicate Thanks T. [1] https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI [2] https://core.telegram.org/

5 4

Pharo and SQLite
by Jimmie Houchin Oct. 18, 2015

Oct. 18, 2015

Hello, I am working on a project for my wife. I initially thought I would keep all my data inside Pharo because it is a simple project and Pharo is great at persistence in the image. But as I pursued the project it felt like I was reinventing the database. So I thought why am I considering working so hard to structure my classes and objects in such a way that I am in effect writing my own database. All of this to avoid using a "real" database. Part of my projects goals is to keep this project contained. I do not want to require my wife or whomever I share this with to have to install anything other than copy or unzip the Pharo folder. No PostgreSQL or MongoDB installs. Keep it simple. This is a goal I have for a lot of my ideas. In my 20+ years of computing and Internet. I have seen lots of applications come and go. (and no, I don't have gray hair, even though I have children older than probably half the people here.) Many years ago, my wife and I made tremendous use out of Apple Works and Microsoft Works. Apple at home and for me Microsoft at work. We loved the ease and simplicity we could throw a database together and just do stuff. It was great. In fact on my work PC I still use weekly and sometimes daily a database I wrote in 1994. I am almost at the point that Windows won't run this ancient MSWorks 4 database. I will have to move my data. Of course these tools aren't the greatest. They have significant limitations, but despite the limitations they were very empowering. My wife started to attempt something similar in LibreOffice but LibreOffice wasn't so simple. It was confusing to her. I briefly looked at LibreOffice but I am not convinced that it is the best or right tool for the job. So that sent me on an adventure to implement this in Pharo. In my learning that I don't want to reinvent the database I have initially settled on using SQLite. SQLite meets my requirements above. It is embedded in my Pharo app and only requires including the database file I create. Very portable and easy to install along with anything else in Pharo. SQLite seems like a very good match and complement to Pharo. A trusted, reliable, external persistence that is as simple and portable as is Pharo. Richard Hipp creator of SQLite has several videos describing how he believes SQLite should be used and should not be used. SQLite: The Database at the Edge of the Network with Dr. Richard Hipp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jib2AmRb_rk 2014 SouthEast LinuxFest - Richard Hipp - SQLite as an Application File Format https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y_ABXwYtuc The videos are inspirational for using SQLite. I like what he says. I encourage watching. I have watched these and others of his including his anti-git video. I am not knowledgeable about the use of git in Pharo, but I would be interested if anybody has considered and knows the pros and cons of using Fossil instead. I know, it wouldn't get us on GitHub. I may be the only one. But that isn't a biggie for me. TL;DW (didn't watch) Use SQLite for Application File Format for persistence instead of a (zipped) pile of files and you get many benefits. Examples in videos as the wrong way, LibreOffice and git. I think using SQLite like this for Pharo would be an excellent match. We gain all the benefits of SQLite, transactions, ACID. In a tool that is nicely (non)licensed, and is used and trusted generally by most all of the software world. For Pharo this buys us an excellent, simple, equally portable persistence. It also buys us persistence that is trusted by people who don't trust the image for their data. This could possible help with people who explore Pharo but aren't comfortable about image only. Now of course it won't help the Emacs or Vim, ... people. I am exploring the idea of using Pharo and SQLite for what I would have previously used Apple/MS Works database for. At first it would be building the app/project for my wife. And during and after that project generalize some things to make a better out of the box solution for like projects. Thoughts, opinions, ideas, wisdom. Any and all appreciated. Thanks. Jimmie

6 14

SQLite error on Pharo 4.
by Offray Vladimir Luna CÃ¡rdenas Oct. 18, 2015

Oct. 18, 2015

Hi all, I have been following the instructions on [1] to install/use SQLite with Pharo 4. But when I try to run the examples I get: "Error: function unavailable". Attached is the trace of the error. I think is related somehow with the fact that I have 64 and 32 bits of sqlite3 installed in my system (Manjaro Linux) and the Native Boost is picking the 64 bits one instead of the 32 bits. I don't know how to solve this though, so any help will be appreciated. [1] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~PharoExtras/NBSQLite3 Cheers, Offray

1 1