Hi, First, I concur with what Norbert said. @Trygve: Could you describe what you would need in more details? Cheers, Doru
On May 8, 2018, at 9:57 AM, Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> wrote:
Am 08.05.2018 um 08:30 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <trygver@ifi.uio.no>:
Norbert, I stand corrected because I have not followed the mainstream languages as well as I probably should. Thank you for your candid answer, it clearly outlines what I can and cannot expect from Pharo and any other ST project.
Ok, I didnât want to sound too harsh but for me there is no benefit in telling something which is not true. And as a member of such community you get sometimes allergic to things that sound negative because that happens far too often. What I said about not upgrading is the thing we suffer from. While you find it that squeak has moved too fast we consider it that it didnât move enough. That is why a lot of the sub-systems need to be replaced and that causes instability. For me the stability is outstanding if I look what is changed all the time. But that is another perspective. For a user of the platform it is simply annoying. We know that but not moving is not option for us so thatâs why I say that frankly. And sadly the only thing that can compensate side-effects due to changes is to put a lot of man power onto it. The programming/software world has not much too say about how change should be done.
I go back to Alan Kay's vision of a Dynabook: A personal computer for children of all ages. It should contain all its owner's personaldata, including his or her personal programs, as they evolve through the years. Continuity is a must; the owner shall never loose data.
We are onto it. If you look at the way we can work, model inspect etc. it is still an wonderful tool. And it is getting better every day while breaking things here and there. I can only repeat what I said earlier. The part of your IDE that copes with language details might break the least because that is the most stable part of the pharo system. But all of the UI system will be replaced in a non-compatible way. Morphic is great but it has grown into a hugly monster. And in this century you might not survive having bitmap based graphics. It might still make perfect sense to you. Because there will be some effort put into the ability to load it into pharo at wish. But I would suspect it wonât change much from there. But it cannot stay because to old-fashioned and not changeable. Maybe it is missing in the Dynabook vision that is not likely that children born after 2000 still wonât too use a graphical interface designed in the 70s being unchanged. But Iâm not sure if the Dynabook vision was supposed to be realized some day or just a vehicle to complain about everything.
Again, thank you for your answers. They have given invaluable contributions to my thinking.
I would have liked to say something more encouraging but â¦.
Norbert
--Trygve.
On 07.05.2018 14:14, Norbert Hartl wrote:
Am 07.05.2018 um 12:42 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <trygver@ifi.uio.no>:
Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc programs stopped working because their runtime systems had changed. Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc compilers stopped compiling old code because the languages had changed.
If we talk about C/C++ the runtime is the operating system. Everytime I update it the linked libraries are suspect to be invalid from then. If you have in the same system update a new version of the C compiler you are doomed. You cannot link your binary with the new libs. And the new C compiler quirks about your code. So what you have then? Staying on an old C language standard? Statically link everything. Ah no that wonât work because you would have to care about all your dependencies being compilable with the new compiler. But you donât update the compiler meaning you donât update the operating system. It is the same as staying on pharo 3.
For Java the situation is slightly different because if you use new programming language features you can only do when switching the compiler to the new standard. There is a lot of effort that went into making the java vm recognize the language version and execute regarding that making version compatible. We are in sync here. I told you it is about manpower. Do you know how much manpower it needed and how long it took to add something like closures to the java language? Do you consider java closure to be en par with other languages?
We are sorry not everything is to your liking. It is not even to our own liking because we have dreams far beyond. But we will never get there if we donât take the effort. And the point of open source (did I mention pharo is open source?? ) is that the ones that do it decide what to do. Nuff said!
Norbert
On 07.05.2018 11:57, Norbert Hartl wrote:
I understand what you are saying but it contains some misconceptions about the modern software world.
âThe earth is not stopping to turn just because you want to stay on the sunny sideâ
There is two funny concepts going on in the modern software industry. The one tells you that because you want to do a product everything else around you should come to a full stop so can comfortably build your software not disturbed by other things. The second one tells you that you _have to upgrade_ ⦠there is this magical force preventing you from staying where you are. Both notions are funny alone but they come combined and then they turn out to be a non-sensical monster.
Letâs take a different approach. Put in everything you say about software, libraries, etc the word version. So you can build upon Pharo version 3 your own product. You can stay at that version and it wonât change. If the software you sell is not 80% pharo but your own you should not have a problem just to stay on that version because you develop your own stuff. But still the world did not stop turning and there is pharo 4. You decide there are a few nice features but the work to adjust is too big to take the risk. Then there is pharo 5 and you ⦠nahhh not this timeâ¦.Then there is pharo6 and they not only changed the image but also the way source code is managed. That prevents you further from adjusting. But hey you can still be happy with pharo3 and it does not change.
So what is the real problem? Yes, money/time is not enough. I think there are a lot of people risking their health to promote pharo and now we have a consortium that can pay engineers to do work on pharo. So let me tell you a future story:
You see what pharo is doing and you think it is good. You can also see that there are too less resources to proceed in the way you need it to go. So you decide to show pharo to the world inspiring people with some kind of a vision. The result is that more people pay into the consortium and we hire more engineers. And then one day the consortium has enough money to pay engineers that can care about a LTS (long term support) version of pharo. So you can stay on pharo version 3 and still get those annoying bugs fixed. And hey this team has also enough time to provide you with tools that make a migration to pharo version 4 more easy and less annoying for you. And then you have your own product based on pharo version 4. And then for version 5, version 6,â¦. Sounds like a dreamâ¦but heyâ¦it is indeed realistic. It just depends on how the people approach it
How does this sound?
Norbert
Am 07.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <trygver@ifi.uio.no>:
Thanks for your quick answer. I have only a fleeting knowledge of Pharo but liked what I saw. The Squeak class library has seen organic growth since 1978 or earlier. Pharo gave it a thorough overhaul. At the Pharo kernel was a minimal image with a minimal class library. The rest of the functionality was partitioned into packages that could be added to the kernel image as required. Beautiful. But only my dream? Matthew 7:24-27: And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand." I am developing an IDE for non-programmers called BabyIDE, a non-intrusive extension of Squeak. Where the Class Browser in Squeak is used to work with one class at the time, the BabyIDE browser is used to work with structures of collaborating objects, ignoring their classes. I would like to develop a BabyIDE image that gets broad usage and long life. I'm looking for a rock to build on and hoped it could be what I thought was the Pharo kernel+ a few selected packages. In your answer, I read that if I build BabyIDE on Pharo, I will be building on sand.
pharo.org writes: "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language...". The only language I can see is defined by the release image. A Pharo programmer builds application programs in this language. He or she can add new classes, change existing ones, subclass them, add or change methods, change the Smalltalk dictionary, etc. etc. An extremely flexible and powerful language.
A tale from the future when Pharo is a mainstream language: Business customers benefit from end users using applications that are written by Pharo programmers who built on the Pharo language and environment that had been developed by the Pharo community. One day there is a happy announcement: A new version of Pharo will be launched tomorrow. It is truly cool and includes any number of improvements, some of them documented. And, by the way, applications written in the current Pharo will no longer work. So please inform your customers that you will not be able to serve them for a while. We are confident that all your application programmers will be happy to drop whatever they are doing in order to adapt their applications to the new Pharo so that you can start serving your customers again.
Cheers --Trygve
On 06.05.2018 13:00, Norbert Hartl wrote:
Can you elaborate on what you consider as a kernel? There are always things moving in the pharo world. The last years the virtual machine got some iterations and it is still not fully stable. For pharo it is hard to have it stable because we feel the need that a lot of the existing parts need to be replaced to be useful in these times. Furthermore pharo is also prototyping platform for programming language features. All of these are counter-stability measures. So if you need a stable kernel from native ground up to UI pharo wonât be that thing you are looking for the coming years (if at all). You always need to adopt to change so you need to define your required scope better in order to get an estimate.
Norbert
Am 06.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <trygver@ifi.uio.no>:
I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it. I have now frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can build on. According to Stephan, this is not so. Is there any plan for creating a stable Pharo kernel that people can use for building software of lasting value for millions of non-expert users? --Thanks, Trygve
On 05.05.2018 13:53, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
Iâve taken a look at what would be needed to support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it professionally on squeak and has not enough capacity to keep up with changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it. Twice a year or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there are no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep implementation specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a lot of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on pharo last
Stephan
--
-- The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate to achieve a goal. Trygve Reenskaug mailto: trygver@ifi.uio.no Morgedalsvn. 5A http://folk.uio.no/trygver/ N-0378 Oslo http://fullOO.info Norway Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
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