Thank you all for your responses, I appreciate all the good feedback around this topic. Rather than try to address individual replies in their respective email responses, I will summary what I learned and what my thoughts are. The trend now is to use http://smalltalkhub.com/ which is a bit like a combination of GitHub (source control) and https://rubygems.org/ (library repository). There are historical precedents for why things are the way they are now: Monticello was really good when it came out and still a fairly useful tool, the nature of Smalltalk images is that all the tools tend to be inside of the image and thus there is little incentive to focus on external tools. I think the nature of the web and the power of contemporary browsers has given rise to quite advanced web applications which have been able to surpass certain tools inside of the traditional Smalltalk image (hence the topic: Github). I'm not going to list its features, anyone that isn't familiar can very easily become familiar with what it can do by trying it out, its free. There's been some confusion, probably because of my forming of the question with poor mapping from the tools that I know to what Pharo/Smalltalk has to offer... so really, there is the question of source control and sharing code between teams and developers and library hosting. Online services that leverage source control and offer tools like easy online browsing of repositories/source code as well as the ability for developers to do pull requests and code review, not to mention forking repositories and reviving dead code, documenting and bug tracking. Besides managing source code, there is the concept of libraries, which overlaps greatly with source code management, but such repositories need not have all the tools previously listed, but do need to have a way to allow developers to quickly find and tap into existing code libraries; to easily create, share and download these libraries is central such a service. In this regard I think Monticello and http://www.squeaksource.com/are the tools in Smalltalk world that map the most to that concept ( https://rubygems.org/)? (correct me if I'm wrong). I understand the image/smalltalk kernel as a self sufficient enclosed world is why live objects are possible, and that's the beauty of Smalltalk. I see there is effort to build towards a more open (in the sense of the world wide web) set of tools to manage code and libraries. I still don't understand why smalltalkhub.com is trying to be both a library and source code control tool at the same time. I think leveraging tools currently available, and which have a large user-base is better for allowing new users who come from another environment -- pretty much everyone that deals with open source web and mobile application development knows how to use GitHub. But I will stick around and see how those that know more about the Smalltalk world make their decisions. I want to see a growing and thriving ST community! Traditionally and culturally, at first glance, forgive me if I'm stereotyping, but the smalltalk world seems to be heavily biased towards academic and large proprietary enterprise tooling and development environments. I think this is a reason (among others, from what I've read around) why ST hasn't picked up steam as the WWW grew up, the developers and tools were simply not geared toward such an environment. However, while I'm guessing that most developers in ST are still heavily oriented toward enterprise platforms, we can all benefit by bringing aboard more developers and creating a large market and demand for ST developers, and I'm going to go on a limb here and say that that's not going to happen until we can integrate with the tools and culture of contemporary web development. Anyone have opinions on this? Perhaps the current tools that I've described aren't the best fit for Smalltalk, and perhaps I'm still currently limited because of my personal development culture 'up-bringing'. I would love to get to know what a more idiomatic toolset can do, as Pharo and the smalltalk environment seems to be quite powerful as is and has been for a long time, and still is ahead of many current and more popular languages and tools. There are other topics I would like to explore in more detail sometime soon: - keeping up to date documentation - creating (current) tutorials for beginners to Smalltalk - minimizing fragmentation and across Smalltalk tools & library & interpreters - evaluating tools for development community discussions that are more accessible and open to newcomers / a larger audience I hope I can get better at ST and try to contribute myself to some things that interest me more... Cheers, Victor Stan Schedule me: http://quicklyschedule.quicklyschedule.me/victor Add me to your address book - it's easy! http://contactmonkey.com/victor On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 4:32 PM, stephane ducasse <stephane.ducasse@free.fr>wrote:

thanks Paul :) we are making progress

...

Rails had 468 committers for its 3.2.0 release [1]. Pharo probably had less than a tenth of that between 1.4 and 2.0 and Seaside 3.0 maybe a fifth of Pharo. As Stuart mentioned there is work being done. Smalltalk is the 48th most popular language on github[2] and so there are projects and tooling for interacting with it. On the mailing list archive across all Smalltalk public mailing lists there are ~2200 posts about github[3] discussing various reasons why things are or are not happening.

Its not that there's not effort, or it doesn't exist, or isn't considered. Its that its either not there yet, or not going to get there because a better option will come up or along that people in the more-limited-in-number-of-people-than-you're-used-to open source Smalltalk community want to work on more than github integration [4].

Which features of git are you missing? Which of github?

[1] http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/releases [2] https://github.com/languages/Smalltalk [3]

http://forum.world.st/template/NamlServlet.jtp?macro=search_page&node=129479...

...

[4] http://www.smalltalkhub.com

On 03/19/2013 06:58 PM, Victor Stan wrote:

...

Why are SmallTalk projects/source code hosted on SS3 Gemstone instead of Git/GitHub?

I'm coming to SmallTalk from the world of web development with open source software, primarily Rails, and I'm very familiar with the amazing social network/source code repository that is GitHub. It is truly an industry defining entity, so many open source projects have been able to harness the ease of use, features and community around Git and GitHub.

At the moment, as I'm trying to learn more about SmallTalk and Pharo especially, (my primary interest in Pharo is to use it as a web development platform), I am a bit shocked, if I may be frank, at the tooling used for source code and open source project management. I see that the popular trend now is to move to SS3/Gemstone, and I appreciate anyone that helps open source development/projects, but I can't see how they can even come close to the functionality of GitHub for source code hosting and OS project management, so I pose the question: is there an effort, why or why not, to start integrating with GitHub and Git for source code management?

I know that historical precent and the tools built into Pharo/SmallTalk images, like Monticello are predecessors to GUI source control, but given the leaps that Git has managed to take, in distributed source code management, how does the existing SmallTalk community feel about it's current tooling in this regard?

Thanks,

Victor Stan

Schedule me: http://quicklyschedule.quicklyschedule.me/victor

Add me to your address book - it's easy! http://contactmonkey.com/victor

Yanni Chiu wrote:

On 21/03/13 10:09 PM, Victor Stan wrote:

...

Traditionally and culturally, at first glance, forgive me if I'm stereotyping, but the smalltalk world seems to be heavily biased towards academic and large proprietary enterprise tooling and development environments. I think this is a reason (among others, from what I've read around) why ST hasn't picked up steam as the WWW grew up, the developers and tools were simply not geared toward such an environment.

The "why did Smalltalk not take off" debate is a regular occurrence on Smalltalk discussion forums.

There used to be Smalltalk implementations that targeted smaller companies. Digitalk Smalltalk was one of these. Unfortunately, at the critical WWW breakout moment, Digitalk was bought by ParcPlace, and eventually killed. Perhaps an independent Digitalk could have adapted as you would have expected.

You may find [1] an interesting historical perspective. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/711140/why-isnt-smalltalk-popular?page=2&... -ben

I am curently working in a business where the whole day is spend with the tech you mention (that means with a team of devs). * jQuery * HTML5 * Symfony 1.x & 2.x PHP (including composer.phar, and a ton of Bundles e.g. REST etc) * Java (Maven2 included for builds, RabbitMQ for some stuff) for heavy lifting * Git/Bitbucket * Newrelic monitoring * PhpStorm & SpringIDE as IDEs * Jenkins building enging Still, Pharo feels better when I've to explore ideas and think straight. Especially when on e needs to prototype fast. Once I grokked Smalltalk, my thinking about code switched to something different. For the better. And not everyone is willing to invest the time it takes to grok Smalltalk, that may be the point. Syntax is easy, OO with messages is harder. As Sven has in his signature: Smalltalk is the red pill. True indeed. Phil 2013/3/22 Victor Stan <victor.stan@gmail.com>:

Thank you all for your responses, I appreciate all the good feedback around this topic.

Rather than try to address individual replies in their respective email responses, I will summary what I learned and what my thoughts are.

The trend now is to use http://smalltalkhub.com/ which is a bit like a combination of GitHub (source control) and https://rubygems.org/ (library repository).

There are historical precedents for why things are the way they are now: Monticello was really good when it came out and still a fairly useful tool, the nature of Smalltalk images is that all the tools tend to be inside of the image and thus there is little incentive to focus on external tools. I think the nature of the web and the power of contemporary browsers has given rise to quite advanced web applications which have been able to surpass certain tools inside of the traditional Smalltalk image (hence the topic: Github). I'm not going to list its features, anyone that isn't familiar can very easily become familiar with what it can do by trying it out, its free.

There's been some confusion, probably because of my forming of the question with poor mapping from the tools that I know to what Pharo/Smalltalk has to offer... so really, there is the question of source control and sharing code between teams and developers and library hosting.

Online services that leverage source control and offer tools like easy online browsing of repositories/source code as well as the ability for developers to do pull requests and code review, not to mention forking repositories and reviving dead code, documenting and bug tracking.

Besides managing source code, there is the concept of libraries, which overlaps greatly with source code management, but such repositories need not have all the tools previously listed, but do need to have a way to allow developers to quickly find and tap into existing code libraries; to easily create, share and download these libraries is central such a service. In this regard I think Monticello and http://www.squeaksource.com/ are the tools in Smalltalk world that map the most to that concept (https://rubygems.org/)? (correct me if I'm wrong).

I understand the image/smalltalk kernel as a self sufficient enclosed world is why live objects are possible, and that's the beauty of Smalltalk. I see there is effort to build towards a more open (in the sense of the world wide web) set of tools to manage code and libraries. I still don't understand why smalltalkhub.com is trying to be both a library and source code control tool at the same time.

I think leveraging tools currently available, and which have a large user-base is better for allowing new users who come from another environment -- pretty much everyone that deals with open source web and mobile application development knows how to use GitHub. But I will stick around and see how those that know more about the Smalltalk world make their decisions. I want to see a growing and thriving ST community!

Traditionally and culturally, at first glance, forgive me if I'm stereotyping, but the smalltalk world seems to be heavily biased towards academic and large proprietary enterprise tooling and development environments. I think this is a reason (among others, from what I've read around) why ST hasn't picked up steam as the WWW grew up, the developers and tools were simply not geared toward such an environment. However, while I'm guessing that most developers in ST are still heavily oriented toward enterprise platforms, we can all benefit by bringing aboard more developers and creating a large market and demand for ST developers, and I'm going to go on a limb here and say that that's not going to happen until we can integrate with the tools and culture of contemporary web development. Anyone have opinions on this?

Perhaps the current tools that I've described aren't the best fit for Smalltalk, and perhaps I'm still currently limited because of my personal development culture 'up-bringing'. I would love to get to know what a more idiomatic toolset can do, as Pharo and the smalltalk environment seems to be quite powerful as is and has been for a long time, and still is ahead of many current and more popular languages and tools.

There are other topics I would like to explore in more detail sometime soon:

keeping up to date documentation creating (current) tutorials for beginners to Smalltalk minimizing fragmentation and across Smalltalk tools & library & interpreters evaluating tools for development community discussions that are more accessible and open to newcomers / a larger audience

I hope I can get better at ST and try to contribute myself to some things that interest me more...

Cheers,

Victor Stan

Schedule me: http://quicklyschedule.quicklyschedule.me/victor

Add me to your address book - it's easy! http://contactmonkey.com/victor

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 4:32 PM, stephane ducasse <stephane.ducasse@free.fr> wrote:

...

thanks Paul :) we are making progress

...

Rails had 468 committers for its 3.2.0 release [1]. Pharo probably had less than a tenth of that between 1.4 and 2.0 and Seaside 3.0 maybe a fifth of Pharo. As Stuart mentioned there is work being done. Smalltalk is the 48th most popular language on github[2] and so there are projects and tooling for interacting with it. On the mailing list archive across all Smalltalk public mailing lists there are ~2200 posts about github[3] discussing various reasons why things are or are not happening.

Its not that there's not effort, or it doesn't exist, or isn't considered. Its that its either not there yet, or not going to get there because a better option will come up or along that people in the more-limited-in-number-of-people-than-you're-used-to open source Smalltalk community want to work on more than github integration [4].

Which features of git are you missing? Which of github?

[1] http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/releases [2] https://github.com/languages/Smalltalk [3]

http://forum.world.st/template/NamlServlet.jtp?macro=search_page&node=129479... [4] http://www.smalltalkhub.com

On 03/19/2013 06:58 PM, Victor Stan wrote:

...

Why are SmallTalk projects/source code hosted on SS3 Gemstone instead of Git/GitHub?

I'm coming to SmallTalk from the world of web development with open source software, primarily Rails, and I'm very familiar with the amazing social network/source code repository that is GitHub. It is truly an industry defining entity, so many open source projects have been able to harness the ease of use, features and community around Git and GitHub.

At the moment, as I'm trying to learn more about SmallTalk and Pharo especially, (my primary interest in Pharo is to use it as a web development platform), I am a bit shocked, if I may be frank, at the tooling used for source code and open source project management. I see that the popular trend now is to move to SS3/Gemstone, and I appreciate anyone that helps open source development/projects, but I can't see how they can even come close to the functionality of GitHub for source code hosting and OS project management, so I pose the question: is there an effort, why or why not, to start integrating with GitHub and Git for source code management?

I know that historical precent and the tools built into Pharo/SmallTalk images, like Monticello are predecessors to GUI source control, but given the leaps that Git has managed to take, in distributed source code management, how does the existing SmallTalk community feel about it's current tooling in this regard?

Thanks,

Victor Stan

Schedule me: http://quicklyschedule.quicklyschedule.me/victor

Add me to your address book - it's easy! http://contactmonkey.com/victor

Depends on how many words there are... 2013/3/29 Sean P. DeNigris <sean@clipperadams.com>

philippeback wrote

...

Syntax is easy, OO with messages is harder.

It seems to me that OO only appears as hard as it does after years of being brainwashed by a clueless academic system that pushes C, C++, and Java. The small children at PARC didn't seem to have a problem with OO ;)

----- Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Why-are-SmallTalk-projects-source-code-hosted-on-SS3-G... Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

On 22 March 2013 10:54, Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> wrote:

Hi,

good write up. You've picked up some essential things pretty quick :) Comments inline!

Am 22.03.2013 um 03:09 schrieb Victor Stan <victor.stan@gmail.com>:

Thank you all for your responses, I appreciate all the good feedback around this topic.

Rather than try to address individual replies in their respective email responses, I will summary what I learned and what my thoughts are.

The trend now is to use http://smalltalkhub.com/ which is a bit like a combination of GitHub (source control) and https://rubygems.org/ (library repository).

There are historical precedents for why things are the way they are now: Monticello was really good when it came out and still a fairly useful tool, the nature of Smalltalk images is that all the tools tend to be inside of the image and thus there is little incentive to focus on external tools. I think the nature of the web and the power of contemporary browsers has given rise to quite advanced web applications which have been able to surpass certain tools inside of the traditional Smalltalk image (hence the topic: Github). I'm not going to list its features, anyone that isn't familiar can very easily become familiar with what it can do by trying it out, its free.

There's been some confusion, probably because of my forming of the question with poor mapping from the tools that I know to what Pharo/Smalltalk has to offer... so really, there is the question of source control and sharing code between teams and developers and library hosting.

Online services that leverage source control and offer tools like easy online browsing of repositories/source code as well as the ability for developers to do pull requests and code review, not to mention forking repositories and reviving dead code, documenting and bug tracking.

Besides managing source code, there is the concept of libraries, which overlaps greatly with source code management, but such repositories need not have all the tools previously listed, but do need to have a way to allow developers to quickly find and tap into existing code libraries; to easily create, share and download these libraries is central such a service. In this regard I think Monticello and http://www.squeaksource.com/ are the tools in Smalltalk world that map the most to that concept (https://rubygems.org/)? (correct me if I'm wrong).

I understand the image/smalltalk kernel as a self sufficient enclosed world is why live objects are possible, and that's the beauty of Smalltalk. I see there is effort to build towards a more open (in the sense of the world wide web) set of tools to manage code and libraries. I still don't understand why smalltalkhub.com is trying to be both a library and source code control tool at the same time.

I think leveraging tools currently available, and which have a large user-base is better for allowing new users who come from another environment -- pretty much everyone that deals with open source web and mobile application development knows how to use GitHub. But I will stick around and see how those that know more about the Smalltalk world make their decisions. I want to see a growing and thriving ST community!

Traditionally and culturally, at first glance, forgive me if I'm stereotyping, but the smalltalk world seems to be heavily biased towards academic and large proprietary enterprise tooling and development environments. I think this is a reason (among others, from what I've read around) why ST hasn't picked up steam as the WWW grew up, the developers and tools were simply not geared toward such an environment. However, while I'm guessing that most developers in ST are still heavily oriented toward enterprise platforms, we can all benefit by bringing aboard more developers and creating a large market and demand for ST developers, and I'm going to go on a limb here and say that that's not going to happen until we can integrate with the tools and culture of contemporary web development. Anyone have opinions on this?

The stereotype about being academicly biased is ok but not quite accurate. If you encounter the smalltalk world from pharo it might look like that. But this is rather pharo specific. If you look at cincom smalltalk the impression will be different.

As others mentioned the discussion about success occurrs regularly on this and other mailing lists.

In your inquiry for opinion you placed some assumptions I cannot share. I cannot agree that "pick up the steam", "grow" "creating a large market" is something good per se. These categories have no value in itself. What do we get for having that kind of success? I do not know how to create success but I know that following these goals would help let smalltalk die.

+1 i think we should focus on improving experience for community (the people who using pharo and know how to make it better), and for people who would like to use it, but missing some key functionality. In any case, this will distill into a list of tasks/goals with clear outcome.

I might ask you why you encounter smalltalk. To learn something new/different? How can you learn something new/different if you think it should do the same as everyone else does? If smalltalk wouldn't be that reluctant it would have e.g. picked about file based source code long ago. And that would have turned it much worse. On the contrary you are quite right that smalltalk suffers from its islandish being. But giving up being on an island should be done carefully in order not to drown in the mainstream.

i would say "to not be washed away".

Norbert

-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.

Small and micro companies, we should actually promote Smalltalk more among them. And for startups, being able to build a solution and put into market very fast. Web solutions specially, noone ask here what is behind, so can sneak-in the Smalltalk without questions so common if you try to build a Smalltalk app for the desktop. Best regards Janko Dne 29. 03. 2013 14:59, piše Sean P. DeNigris:

Victor wrote

...

Traditionally and culturally, at first glance, forgive me if I'm stereotyping, but the smalltalk world seems to be heavily biased towards academic and large proprietary enterprise tooling and development environments

I have also heard this (from non-Smalltalkers). My experience in the community (just 3 years) is markedly different. Although there is definitely strength in academic (e.g. Noury's great robotics stuff [2]) and enterprise settings, if I had to pick the most common scenario, I see many vibrant small businesses (e.g. Inceptive [1]) doing web and desktop apps.

For myself, I use Smalltalk as it was intended... as prototype Dynabook software ;) I am slowly wrapping my world (calendar, todos, notetaking, journal) in Smalltalk because I will not accept anything less from my computer than live turtles all the way down.

I also use it to replace shell scripts, to run Jenkins jobs, and to write web and desktop apps for small businesses - you would never run out of work if you went around to people using Excel spreadsheets and built Smalltalk apps that express their intentions on their own terms, instead of Excel's (or whatever other off the shelf garbage they're using).

[1] http://inceptive.be/ [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=noury+robotics

p.s. Pharo has laid a lot of groundwork in the last few years to magnify all this. When I first discovered Smalltalk, I was excited by the power, but frustrated by the mess under the covers of Squeak (FileDirectory was particularly agonizing). Whenever I started to develop a revolutionary-next-cool tool, I ran into a mess like the text model. Since then, Pharo has been steadily evolving many foundational pieces. There has been an upfront cost of backward-compatibility, as some great projects have not kept pace. But it seems all worth it, as I feel us approaching a critical point where the clean, beautiful system will inspire and support the next generation of amazing ideas on top of Pharo.

p.p.s. Squeak has also made a lot of progess and I value it highly :) I'm particularly excited about the cooperation and cross-pollination that I've seen recently...

----- Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Why-are-SmallTalk-projects-source-code-hosted-on-SS3-G... Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

-- Janko Mivšek Aida/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

On Mar 29, 2013, at 2:59 PM, Sean P. DeNigris <sean@clipperadams.com> wrote:

p.s. Pharo has laid a lot of groundwork in the last few years to magnify all this. When I first discovered Smalltalk, I was excited by the power, but frustrated by the mess under the covers of Squeak (FileDirectory was particularly agonizing). Whenever I started to develop a revolutionary-next-cool tool, I ran into a mess like the text model. Since then, Pharo has been steadily evolving many foundational pieces. There has been an upfront cost of backward-compatibility, as some great projects have not kept pace. But it seems all worth it, as I feel us approaching a critical point where the clean, beautiful system will inspire and support the next generation of amazing ideas on top of Pharo.

I think so too. We often neglect the power of sound infrastructure. For example I know industrial people that are evaluating Pharo for their UI prototyping and it is using Athens and soon cool event touch infrastructure. Stef

On 2013-03-20, at 10:50, Davorin Rusevljan <davorin.rusevljan@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 2:58 AM, Victor Stan <victor.stan@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Why are SmallTalk projects/source code hosted on SS3 Gemstone instead of Git/GitHub?

I'm coming to SmallTalk from the world of web development with open source software, primarily Rails, and I'm very familiar with the amazing social network/source code repository that is GitHub. It is truly an industry defining entity, so many open source projects have been able to harness the ease of use, features and community around Git and GitHub.

At the moment, as I'm trying to learn more about SmallTalk and Pharo especially, (my primary interest in Pharo is to use it as a web development platform), I am a bit shocked, if I may be frank, at the tooling used for source code and open source project management. I see that the popular trend now is to move to SS3/Gemstone, and I appreciate anyone that helps open source development/projects, but I can't see how they can even come close to the functionality of GitHub for source code hosting and OS project management, so I pose the question: is there an effort, why or why not, to start integrating with GitHub and Git for source code management?

I know that historical precent and the tools built into Pharo/SmallTalk images, like Monticello are predecessors to GUI source control, but given the leaps that Git has managed to take, in distributed source code management, how does the existing SmallTalk community feel about it's current tooling in this regard?

First welcome!

As others have said, there are efforts to use git as source control and I am looking forward to their progress. As for slow adoption of git, I think the following might be some of the reasons:

1) file based VCS, are a bit rude for Smalltalk, which operates on smaller source granularity, and typicall Smalltalk based VCS handle that in more natural way

not true... and just for the record, Monticello is file-based too, it does not store any high-level information. If you store each method as separate file as done with filetree you get exactly the same granularity as monticello. see: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-core

2) Monticello is distributed VCS, and I am not so sure that it compared to git lacks many features that would be esseintial to Smalltalk developer. (but since I am only causal user of both, I might be wrong on this)

as a model monticello and git overlap pretty well, however many things are much more implicit in monticello than in git (namely branches).