Hi Guillermo

Thanks for you clear writing in your blog (even i can understand it :o)

A very long time ago we had also bootstrap loaders. It was a small
deck of about 40 punch cards (40 assembler source lines)
to awaken an NCR mainframe, which then spend its long day
with running accounting programs..

related cool nostalgia:
http://www.ruleworks.co.uk/digital/NCR-Century-Mainframes.htm

you won't believe this:
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/NCR/NCR.CRAM.1960.102646240.pdf

I am inclined to see a Smalltalk image almost as a living thing, which
you can send to sleep and awaken again. You topic "The Image Dilemma should be read by a lot of IT-ers that are not Smalltalkers.
Image based: It should be obvious..

Writing out a new improved and cleaned image dynamically , that's a very good idea!

UCACUUGUCGGUCAAAUCU...
Can't help the association: I just saw a documentary on Arte TV, about creating biological life from DNA-fragments "from scratch" so to speak. Wow, Fascinating, thrilling. If Smalltalk would be a cell (e.g. a bacteria), then the Smalltalk core (its image) would be comparable to its DNA string. So, taking this analogy further, sending out its image is like e.g. a virus emitting its DNA.. but this is perhaps where the analogy ends, because, if i get this right, you would be running "intelligent" agents through an existing image (DNA) to synthesize and emit a changed/improved? new image. However, in biosphere, the changes are mostly caused "outside" by natural selection, where better adapted entities (DNA) survive. (or is there also (inside the cell internal DNA changing going on) It would be it lot's of tiny? Smalltalk entities interacting in a conditioning environment and improve that way..
but this is 2012..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/DNA_replication_en.svg/450px-DNA_replication_en.svg.png

should it inspire you?

kind Regards

Ted

ted van gaalen it services

Ted F.A. van Gaalen
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On 03.06.2012 06:38, Guillermo Polito wrote:

Hi all!

Probably some of you already saw my tweets about it: http://playingwithobjects.wordpress.com/. I'll be writing there stuff, whatever I want to write :). Probably in this first few weeks, documentation about the Pharo bootstrap project.

I didn't make it public before because I wanted to see if I had time and will to write. And it seems I have both :).

So far, three posts:
- how the objects are formatted in memory for the VM
- image based vs non image based environments
- bootstrap introduction

Please, do not hesitate to leave me your comments. I'm very far from being a gurú on any of the things I write, so do not expect that. Even better: expect me to make mistakes and write wrong things, and please correct me :).

Saludos,
Guille