Writing that kind of code is another of the reasons I decided I donât want to work in anything else ð. Maybe more important than some of the others, both to myself and to other users. Iâve gained so much personally, mostly for nothing, even just considering the relatively few projects I have been able to work on in Pharo and previously in Squeak, VW and VA. Unfortunately in most I havenât been able to make the code public, since they were for entities like the government, DoD, etc. Not that VA attracts me quite so much to give back all that strongly, when a license is $8500+. Were it possible to give back to VA C++ or VA Java, it might be different, but neither were OSS although they werenât expensive. More relevantly, both are now abandonware (hence my comment about IBM, which is applicable to OS/2 as well, although that has quietly had a 5.0 version released in June of this year). I would, though, love a chance to give back to Pharo primarily, although I may port anything relevant to Squeak, and if I have sufficient time port it to VW, which although not OSS is at least affordable to most developers. Iâm nearly there on a couple of projects â one Iâm testing and making final tweaks, another is about 2/3dâs of the way. The first project you (and others on the list) may be more immediately interested in testing, since it requires little to no additional work to use it, and even if not perfect, since itâs intended to directly help work you are doing in Pharo, it may worthwhile. Iâm hoping to have it ready for public consumption by the middle of November. On a different but related topic, the article I wrote got a fair amount of interest considering I donât write nearly as well as Kenneth, for example. Including direct interest from some well known industry people, which canât hurt. In an indirect way it may even be helpful, but not in the real, direct way decent code is. Capabilities that wonât be available in anything else in an really usable way (because to be efficient they depend on capabilities not found in anything else), and in any case nowhere near as useful in anything else, will hopefully be more use than any article can be, never mind one I wrote, not just to me but also to other Pharo users and to Pharo itself. Cheers Andrew Glynn Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Stephane Ducasse Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2017 5:09 AM To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Hi andrew please take a project that would help to bring more companies and that you want to push and push it with us :). Stef On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 11:05 AM, Stephane Ducasse <stepharo.self@gmail.com> wrote: Hi andrew you should contact esteban because he is writing an objective-C bridge. Stef On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 2:30 AM, Andrew Glynn <aglynn42@gmail.com> wrote: One thing Iâm working on is a bridge between Pharo and F-Script. F-Script is, basically, a Smalltalk dialect, as is obvious from the screenshot. However for MacOS and iOS, it allows you to bypass the static Objective-C API interface and debug / modify or even write applications directly in the system. To do that you âinjectâ F-Script into the OS. The ability to so has a specific implication, though. MacOS and iOS are themselves written in and as a dialect of Smalltalk. (were it simply an overlay on Objective-C, it wouldnât be able to do things that are impossible in Objective-C, and it wouldnât need to be âinjectedâ in order to run). Every implementation of Objective-C , bar GNUâs useless imitation, compiles to Smalltalk. No surprise that Appleâs does, as well.  In any event, it will allow Pharo code to be mapped to MacOS and iOS objects, injected into the system dynamically, and modified / debugged dynamically using the Pharo tools. The result, at least as far as iOS is concerned, may make Pharo actually the most powerful way to program it, well beyond XCode alone, along with doing the same for MacOS. Android is another issue, although the Raspbian port of Pharo should be relatively easy to port to it. For me, unless someone had a use case, I donât have one myself for Android. Iâve tried nearly every version, because Iâd love to support an OSS ecosystem, unfortunately using it compared to the iPhone is still like driving a Fiero based kit car compared to an actual Ferrari.  As far as JNI, while I see your point, JNI is such a PITA that few Java developers know it. My usual workaround is to use Stamp and Synapse, which has the further advantage of allowing Java to âthrottleâ data that the JVM canât deal with at full speed.  As far as dealing with other JVM languages, PetitParser or SmaCC can generate bytecode rather than Java or other JVM code, and that allows libs to be written that utilize Synapse to talk to Pharo. It isnât necessarily an ideal solution, but a possible one without having to support umpteen environments. Another potential way of accomplishing that is to use NetRexx, a declarative JVM language, which is both easy and terse, and like SQL, generates the actual bytecode rather than precompiling to it. For instance, imagine the code needed for a simple âhello worldâ in Java, then compare:  Say âhello worldâ  Since it generates virtually the same bytecode, it may be an easy way to do it.  With the last statement, that expresses really well the exact reason I no longer want to work in most other environments ð.  Tc Andrew    Sent from Mail for Windows 10  From: phil@highoctane.be Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 2:19 AM To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument  I like that piece a lot, seeing exactly the described situation in large enterprises.  I made a strategic decision to go with Pharo for the long run for my solutions because it is a stable base on which to build (ok, there are evolutions, but fundamentally, I can rely on it being under control and can maintain solutions in a version).  The rationale is that at a deep level I am really fed up with having to deal with accidental complexity (now having to deal with Spark/Scala/sbt/Java/maven stuff) that makes the dev focus 80% technology drag and 20% net business contribution.  One key thing is that a team needs guidance and Smalltalk makes it easier due to well known ways of doing things.  Now we miss the boat on mobile and bigdata, but this is solvable.  If we had an open Java bridge (and some people in the community have it for Pharo but do not open source it - so this is eminently doable) + Pharo as an embeddable piece (e.g. like Tcl and Lua) and not a big executable we would have a way to embed Pharo in a lot of places (e.g. in the Hadoop ecosystem where fast starting VMs and small footprint would make the cluster capacity x2 or x3 vs uberjars all over the place)  this would be a real disruption.  Think about being able to call Pharo from JNA https://github.com/java-native-access/jna the same way we use C with UFFI.  Smalltalk argument for me is that it makes development bearable (even fun and enjoyable would I say) vs the other stacks. That matters.  Phil         On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 12:46 AM, Andrew Glynn <aglynn42@gmail.com> wrote: Thereâs other questions that are relevant to me:  Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps? No, I donât use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.  Do I give a f*** about mobile apps? No, the screenâs too small to read anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.  Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages? No, because most of them are crap in every language Iâve had to work in, and the base languages are crap so they have to keep changing radically, and libraries and frameworks therefore also have to and never get any better. The few that are worthwhile I can almost always use from Smalltalk without a problem (read, Blender, ACT-R and Synapse, since every other library/framework Iâve used outside Smalltalk has been a waste of time).  Do I give a f*** about implementing a complex piece of machine learning software in 22 hours, compared to 3 months for the Java version? Well, actually yes, I do, because that was 3 months of my life down the toilet for something that is too slow to be useful in Java.  Any argument depends on your priorities. Iâve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid. Iâve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps. However, Iâm not going to do any of that any longer in crap that never improves, because after 26 years the irritability it produces is more than itâs worth.  A few weeks ago, a recruiter that specializes in Smalltalk called me about a job, although they were well aware I live 1500 miles away from the city I lived in when I had worked through them, to see if Iâd be willing to move back there for a job. That sounds like another âthere arenât enough Smalltalk developersâ, but it wasnât, because the job wasnât writing Smalltalk. It was writing Java.  The person hiring, though, wouldnât look at anyone who didnât write Smalltalk, because âpeople who grew up with Java donât know how to write codeâ. I donât agree with that, Iâve known a (very few) good Java developers. I would say, though, that Iâve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I canât think of any incompetent Smalltalk developers off the top of my head.  Nor have I ever heard a developer in Smalltalk, or Haskell, or LISP, or even C, complain about how hard maintaining state is or coming up with various hacks to avoid it, which seems to be the main point of every JavaScript based âtechnologyâ. An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.  If youâre a good developer you can write good code in (nearly) anything. My question then is why would you want to write in crap? The better question is why arenât there more good developers in any language?  Every project I have been able to do in Smalltalk, though, has had one thing in common, the âshit has to workâ. Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises Iâve worked for whoâve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when âshit has to workâ. They know itâs more productive, they also know using it for more things would increase the availability of Smalltalk developers.  Why do they not do it? One reason, though it takes a while to recognize it, because management doesnât admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often. Being inefficient, as long as it doesnât âreallyâ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors donât.  Why donât their competitors do it? Because they canât see past an hourly rate, whatâs fashionable, or just new, or because their customers canât. Put more generally, average stupidity that isnât corrected by the market. Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they canât afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they canât give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site donât work.  Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters. When it doesnât, itâs to their advantage to promote things that are inefficient, buggy and unreliable.  Cost is relevant, but not in the simple way people look at things. A crucial but rarely mentioned perspective on its relevance is that while Java based software runs TV set top boxes, Smalltalk based software runs things like medical equipment, automated defense systems, tanks, etc. Cost becomes largely irrelevant when âshit has to workâ.  Productivity is primarily relevant to less talented developers, in an inversely sense, since unproductive environments and attitudes have a leveling tendency in general, and more specifically make accomplishing what the less talented are capable of in any environment sufficiently laborious for them to have a role. Capability in Smalltalk, as implied by the person hiring for the Java role I mentioned, is a fairly decent means of judging whether someone is a so-so developer or a good one.  The productivity argument is realistically only relevant in the context of an already higher hourly cost. Given that it is relevant at that point, companies that know Smalltalk is more productive would use it outside things that have to be 100%, if their own productivity were relevant to the same degree that competitorsâ productivity is inversely relevant.  All these ways of looking at it are contingent perspectives though. Yes, if the number of libraries is relevant to you, Smalltalk is less attractive, but thatâs only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it canât be used as explanatory for that popularity. All the ways of looking at it that are fully determinate are determinate via contingencies of that kind, which for the most part are precisely the other perspectives, including productivity, cost, availability of developers, etc. None of them is in itself anything but a result of the others.  If availability of developers is contingent on popularity (and further, popularity contingent on industry attitudes), to use an example already mentioned in Joachimâs post, then his simultaneous posit of library availability is if anything more contingent on the same popularity, so positing it as a cause and not a result, or merely a correlate, of popularity is incoherent. We can go one step further, and demonstrate that even when large enterprises make something that works reliably available, they fail to promote and support it, which destroys the market for reliable tooling by simultaneously owning it while not promoting it, something IBM is particularly good at. But IBM canât (and if they canât, neither can any other company) operate that way without the tacit agreement of the industry.  To understand it in a more general way, software development has to be looked at in the context where it occurs, and how itâs determined to a large degree by that context, with a specific difference. That difference is itself implicit in the context, i.e. capitalism, but only purely effective in software development. Itâs a result of virtualization as an implicit goal of capitalism, and the disruptions implicit in the virtual but so far only realized completely in software. In terms of that understanding, the analysis of virtualization and disruption as inherent to capitalism is better accomplished in Kapital than in any more recent work.  Or you can simply decide, as Iâve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isnât worthwhile to you, no matter how popular those ways and tools might be, or what the posited reasons are, since at the end popularity is only insofar as it already is. What those tools and methods are depends to a degree on your priorities, but if developers are engineers those priorities canât be completely arbitrary. Engineers are defined by their ability to make things work.  Software as virtual is inherently disruptive, and the software industry disrupts itself too often and too easily to build on anything. A further disruption caused by developers, as engineers, refusing to work with crap that doesnât, i.e. insisting on being engineers, while in itself merely an aggravation of the disruptive tendencies, might have an inverse result.  Using a stable core of technologies as the basis for a more volatile set of products, in the way nearly every other industry does, is the best means we know of to build things both flexibly and reasonably efficiently. The computer hardware industry is the extreme example of this, while the software industry is the extreme contradiction.  From: Pharo-users <pharo-users-bounces@lists.pharo.org> on behalf of David Mason <dmason@ryerson.ca> Reply-To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> Date: Tuesday, October 24, 2017 at 11:52 AM To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument  PharoJS is working to give you that mobile app/browser app experience. As with others, we're not there yet, but getting there. See http://pharojs.org  The 67% loved means that 67% of people using Smalltalk (or perhaps have ever used it) want to continue - so it's presumably a high percentage of a smallish number of people.  On 20 October 2017 at 03:23, jtuchel@objektfabrik.de <jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> wrote: First of all: I'd say the question itself is not a question but an excuse. I am not arguing there are enough Smalltalkers or cheap ones. But I think the question is just a way of saying "we don't want to do it for reasons that we ourselves cannot really express". If you are a good developer, learning Smalltalk is easy. If you are a good developer you've heard the sentence "we've taken the goos parts from x,y,z and Smalltalk" at least twice a year. So you most likely would like to learn it anyways. A shortage of developers doesn't exist. What exists is an unwillingness of companies to get people trained in a technology. If Smalltalk was cool and great in their opinion, they wouldn't care. It's that simple. As a consultant, I've heard that argument so often. Not ferom Startups, but from insurance companies, Banks or Car manufacturers who spend millions on useless, endless meetings and stuff instead of just hiring somebody to teach a couple of developers Smalltalk. It's just a lie: the shortage of Smalltalk developers is not a problem. And, to be honest: what is it we actually are better in by using Smalltalk? Can we build cool looking web apps in extremely short time? No. Can we build mobile Apps with little effort? No. Does our Smalltalk ship lots of great libraries for all kinds of things that are not availabel in similar quality in any other language? Are we lying when we say we are so extremely over-productive as compared to other languages? I know, all that live debugging stuff and such is great and it is much faster to find & fix a bug in Smalltalk than in any other environment I've used so far. But that is really only true for business code. When I need to connect to things or want to build a modern GUI or a web application with a great look&feel, I am nowhere near productive, because I simply have to build my own stuff or learn how to use other external resources. If I want to build something for a mobile device, I will only hear that somebody somewhere has done it before. No docs, no proof, no ready-made tool for me. Shortage of developers is not really the problem. If Smalltalk was as cool as we like to make ourselves believe, this problem would be non-existent. If somebody took out their iPad and told an audience: "We did this in Smalltalk in 40% of the time it would have taken in Swift", and if that something was a must-have for people, things would be much easier. But nobody has. I am absolutely over-exaggerating, because I make my living with an SaaS product written in Smalltalk (not Pharo). I have lots of fun with Smalltalk and - as you - am convince that many parts of what we've done so far would've taken much longer or even be impossible in other languages. But the advantage was eaten by our extremely steep learning curve for web technologies and for building something that works almost as well as tools like Angular or jQuery Mobile. Smalltalk is cool, and the day somebody shows me something like Google's flutter in Smalltalk, I am ready to bet a lot on a bright future for Smalltalk. But until then, I'd say these arguments about productivity are just us trying to make ourselves believe we're still the top of the food chain. We've done that for almost thirty years now and still aren't ready to stop it. But we've been lying to ourselves and still do so. I don't think there is a point in discussing about the usefulness of a language using an argument like the number or ready-made developers. That is just an argument they know you can't win. The real question is and should be: what is the benefit of using Smalltalk. Our productivity argument is a lie as soon as we have to build something that uses or runs on technology that has been invented after 1990. Okay, shoot ;-) Joachim -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel     mailto:jtuchel@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   Â