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

On 20-10-17 09:23, jtuchel@objektfabrik.de wrote:

And, to be honest: what is it we actually are better in by using Smalltalk?

Making software that stays maintainable. It might be survivor bias, but smalltalk systems continue to be maintained by far smaller groups of developers than competing technologies. Stephan

Peter, our mail provider decided to move all of the pharo mailing list messages to the spam folder, so I haven't seen many messages in the last days. I was already starting to wonder why nobody ever answered my posts ;-) Your smalltalk express idea sounds interesting. I look forward to trying it. Joachim Am 20.10.17 um 16:21 schrieb Peter Fisk:

Thank you Joachim!

That is the most honest assessment of the situation of Smalltalk in 2017 that I have ever seen.

And I agree with you 100%.

We need a new Smalltalk which is both "cool" and can seamlessly integrate with all of the latest web technologies.

I will be releasing a new Smalltalk framework very shortly called "Smalltalk Express".

The interpreter is written in the "Go" language and can run on all of the major web platforms such as Google, Heroku, etc.

I use Pharo to manage the Smalltalk code.

Here is a new blog that I have started to discuss the project.

https://smalltalkexpress.quora.com/

Also, I have reserved the web address "smalltalk.express" for use once the code goes live.

There is a video in the blog post so you can get an idea of where things stand right now.

-- Peter

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 3:23 AM, jtuchel@objektfabrik.de <mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> <jtuchel@objektfabrik.de <mailto: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 <mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> Fliederweg 1 http://www.objektfabrik.de D-71640 Ludwigsburg http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com <http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com> Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 <tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%200>    Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1 <tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%201>

-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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

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

It’s well said, I don’t give a f*** about other languages. NSA-proof, anonymized 2048-bit key rendezvoused connection framework in 33 classes. Includes user definable cipher and encoder. SmalltalkHub talkin ParrotTalk. http://www.squeaksource.com/Cryptography/ParrotTalk-HenryHouse.3.mcz - HH On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 18:46, Andrew Glynn <[aglynn42@gmail.com]("mailto:aglynn42@gmail.com")> wrote:

There’s other questions that are relevant to me:

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps? No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps? No, the screen’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid. I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps. However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job. That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk. It was writing Java.

The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code". I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers. I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’. An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.

If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work". Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work". They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often. Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.

Why don’t their competitors do it? Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t. Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market. Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.

Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters. When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.

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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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]("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]("mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de") <[jtuchel@objektfabrik.de]("mailto: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]("mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de") Fliederweg 1 [http://www.objektfabrik.de]("http://www.objektfabrik.de") D-71640 Ludwigsburg [http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com]("http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com") Telefon: [+49 7141 56 10 86 0]("tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%200") Fax: [+49 7141 56 10 86 1]("tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%201")

This is a goal of ParrotTalk, to bring bit-compatible communications to Squeak, Pharo and Java. This is not an invocation bridge you speak of but a communications bridge to be able to run against Hadoop or whichever big data needs integration with (Kafka). I had hoped it might be adopted for such. Yet again this is not exactly what you were looking for but yet interesting perhaps? - HH On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 02:17, phil@highoctane.be <[phil@highoctane.be]("mailto:phil@highoctane.be")> wrote:

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]("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]("mailto:aglynn42@gmail.com")> wrote:

...

There’s other questions that are relevant to me:

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps? No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps? No, the screen’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid. I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps. However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job. That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk. It was writing Java.

The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code". I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers. I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’. An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.

If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work". Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work". They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often. Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.

Why don’t their competitors do it? Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t. Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market. Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.

Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters. When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.

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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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]("mailto:pharo-users-bounces@lists.pharo.org")> on behalf of David Mason <[dmason@ryerson.ca]("mailto:dmason@ryerson.ca")> Reply-To: Any question about pharo is welcome <[pharo-users@lists.pharo.org]("mailto: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]("mailto: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]("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]("mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de") <[jtuchel@objektfabrik.de]("mailto: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]("mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de") Fliederweg 1 [http://www.objektfabrik.de]("http://www.objektfabrik.de") D-71640 Ludwigsburg [http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com]("http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com") Telefon: [+49 7141 56 10 86 0]("tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%200") Fax: [+49 7141 56 10 86 1]("tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%201")

Perhaps not, or not yet. Perhaps it is the communications foundation for an always-on cloud/bigData control layer. I would position ParrotTalk as a Kerberos transport. ParrotTalk does 2048-bin key negotiation and subsequent encryption/encoding, both user-supplied. Please see the attached diagram, co-locating ParrotTalk with my other components. ParrotTalk does not do user authentication/authorization. Which means to me that I should consider Kerberos authorization/authentication to establish as an integratable transport to play in bigData. This means you still need a Kerberos client and I need a Kerberos client. How do we start? - HH PS: I did much work integrating Kafka into a framework. I was thinking of inserting msg sending replication to a partition count of replicate queues for sending and receiving Hubbub traffic, thus inserting right where Kerberos is in the diagram. I would love to see client coupling for Kerberos, Kafka and Hadoop, while I figure out proper security to make that group happy with this as a possible control layer solution, forking off jobs. On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 03:14, phil@highoctane.be <[phil@highoctane.be]("mailto:phil@highoctane.be")> wrote:

Sure. Current main issue is to have Pharo work with Kerberos as secured Hadoop uses the UGI (UserGroupInformation) thing and that is a black hole of crypto things.

How would you see ParrotTalk work?

I made a XmppTalk thing (binding for libstrophe) for having Pharo images and other stuff talk together (currently using OpenFire/Gajim/Profanity) FWIW

See [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HTG3GB3xdwlje8wADZPjUQNIyA6tmuxyZz1UaX5ikEU/edit?usp=sharing]("https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HTG3GB3xdwlje8wADZPjUQNIyA6tmuxyZz1UaX5ikEU/edit?usp=sharing")

libstrophe does the SSL thing under the hood (using OpenSSL) and is actively maintained. [https://github.com/strophe/libstrophe/blob/master/src/tls_openssl.c]("https://github.com/strophe/libstrophe/blob/master/src/tls_openssl.c")

And I currently work with Kafka so, Pharo as a consumer or producer, sure am interested. But need Kerberos support.

Tell me more about your vision. Even better, draw it in some way :-)

Phil

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 8:43 AM, henry <[henry@callistohouse.club]("mailto:henry@callistohouse.club")> wrote:

...

This is a goal of ParrotTalk, to bring bit-compatible communications to Squeak, Pharo and Java. This is not an invocation bridge you speak of but a communications bridge to be able to run against Hadoop or whichever big data needs integration with (Kafka). I had hoped it might be adopted for such. Yet again this is not exactly what you were looking for but yet interesting perhaps?

- HH

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 02:17, [phil@highoctane.be]("mailto:phil@highoctane.be") <phil@highoctane.be> wrote:

...

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:

...

There’s other questions that are relevant to me:

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps? No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps? No, the screen’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid. I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps. However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job. That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk. It was writing Java.

The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code". I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers. I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’. An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.

If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work". Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work". They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often. Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.

Why don’t their competitors do it? Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t. Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market. Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.

Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters. When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.

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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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

I think another good service to integrate well to is Elastic Search. Of the 4 types of integration, I vote for and step forward to volunteer to help Kerberos integration in Pharo. What to do? - HH On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 09:06, henry <[henry@callistohouse.club]("mailto:henry@callistohouse.club")> wrote:

I try posting with a smaller image.

["hubbub.jpg"]

- HH

...

——— Original Message ——— Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Local Time: October 26, 2017 8:52 AM UTC Time: October 26, 2017 12:52 PM From: henry@callistohouse.club To: phil@highoctane.be <phil@highoctane.be>, Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>

Perhaps not, or not yet. Perhaps it is the communications foundation for an always-on cloud/bigData control layer.

I would position ParrotTalk as a Kerberos transport. ParrotTalk does 2048-bin key negotiation and subsequent encryption/encoding, both user-supplied.

Please see the attached diagram, co-locating ParrotTalk with my other components.

ParrotTalk does not do user authentication/authorization. Which means to me that I should consider Kerberos authorization/authentication to establish as an integratable transport to play in bigData.

This means you still need a Kerberos client and I need a Kerberos client. How do we start?

- HH

PS: I did much work integrating Kafka into a framework. I was thinking of inserting msg sending replication to a partition count of replicate queues for sending and receiving Hubbub traffic, thus inserting right where Kerberos is in the diagram. I would love to see client coupling for Kerberos, Kafka and Hadoop, while I figure out proper security to make that group happy with this as a possible control layer solution, forking off jobs.

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 03:14, phil@highoctane.be <[phil@highoctane.be](""mailto:phil@highoctane.be"")> wrote:

...

Sure. Current main issue is to have Pharo work with Kerberos as secured Hadoop uses the UGI (UserGroupInformation) thing and that is a black hole of crypto things.

How would you see ParrotTalk work?

I made a XmppTalk thing (binding for libstrophe) for having Pharo images and other stuff talk together (currently using OpenFire/Gajim/Profanity) FWIW

See [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HTG3GB3xdwlje8wADZPjUQNIyA6tmuxyZz1UaX5ikEU/edit?usp=sharing](""https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HTG3GB3xdwlje8wADZPjUQNIyA6tmuxyZz1UaX5ikEU/edit?usp=sharing"")

libstrophe does the SSL thing under the hood (using OpenSSL) and is actively maintained. [https://github.com/strophe/libstrophe/blob/master/src/tls_openssl.c](""https://github.com/strophe/libstrophe/blob/master/src/tls_openssl.c"")

And I currently work with Kafka so, Pharo as a consumer or producer, sure am interested. But need Kerberos support.

Tell me more about your vision. Even better, draw it in some way :-)

Phil

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 8:43 AM, henry <[henry@callistohouse.club](""mailto:henry@callistohouse.club"")> wrote:

...

This is a goal of ParrotTalk, to bring bit-compatible communications to Squeak, Pharo and Java. This is not an invocation bridge you speak of but a communications bridge to be able to run against Hadoop or whichever big data needs integration with (Kafka). I had hoped it might be adopted for such. Yet again this is not exactly what you were looking for but yet interesting perhaps?

- HH

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 02:17, [phil@highoctane.be](""mailto:phil@highoctane.be"") <phil@highoctane.be> wrote:

...

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:

...

There’s other questions that are relevant to me:

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps? No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps? No, the screen’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid. I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps. However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job. That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk. It was writing Java.

The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code". I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers. I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’. An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.

If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work". Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work". They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often. Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.

Why don’t their competitors do it? Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t. Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market. Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.

Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters. When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.

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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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

A Kerberos effort will have to be a group effort. Sideways to my main focus and your all’s main focii. - HH On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 09:15, henry <[henry@callistohouse.club]("mailto:henry@callistohouse.club")> wrote:

I think another good service to integrate well to is Elastic Search.

Of the 4 types of integration, I vote for and step forward to volunteer to help Kerberos integration in Pharo. What to do?

- HH

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 09:06, henry <[henry@callistohouse.club](""mailto:henry@callistohouse.club"")> wrote:

...

I try posting with a smaller image.

[""hubbub.jpg""]

- HH

...

——— Original Message ——— Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Local Time: October 26, 2017 8:52 AM UTC Time: October 26, 2017 12:52 PM From: henry@callistohouse.club To: phil@highoctane.be <phil@highoctane.be>, Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>

Perhaps not, or not yet. Perhaps it is the communications foundation for an always-on cloud/bigData control layer.

I would position ParrotTalk as a Kerberos transport. ParrotTalk does 2048-bin key negotiation and subsequent encryption/encoding, both user-supplied.

Please see the attached diagram, co-locating ParrotTalk with my other components.

ParrotTalk does not do user authentication/authorization. Which means to me that I should consider Kerberos authorization/authentication to establish as an integratable transport to play in bigData.

This means you still need a Kerberos client and I need a Kerberos client. How do we start?

- HH

PS: I did much work integrating Kafka into a framework. I was thinking of inserting msg sending replication to a partition count of replicate queues for sending and receiving Hubbub traffic, thus inserting right where Kerberos is in the diagram. I would love to see client coupling for Kerberos, Kafka and Hadoop, while I figure out proper security to make that group happy with this as a possible control layer solution, forking off jobs.

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 03:14, phil@highoctane.be <[phil@highoctane.be]("""mailto:phil@highoctane.be""")> wrote:

...

Sure. Current main issue is to have Pharo work with Kerberos as secured Hadoop uses the UGI (UserGroupInformation) thing and that is a black hole of crypto things.

How would you see ParrotTalk work?

I made a XmppTalk thing (binding for libstrophe) for having Pharo images and other stuff talk together (currently using OpenFire/Gajim/Profanity) FWIW

See [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HTG3GB3xdwlje8wADZPjUQNIyA6tmuxyZz1UaX5ikEU/edit?usp=sharing]("""https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HTG3GB3xdwlje8wADZPjUQNIyA6tmuxyZz1UaX5ikEU/edit?usp=sharing""")

libstrophe does the SSL thing under the hood (using OpenSSL) and is actively maintained. [https://github.com/strophe/libstrophe/blob/master/src/tls_openssl.c]("""https://github.com/strophe/libstrophe/blob/master/src/tls_openssl.c""")

And I currently work with Kafka so, Pharo as a consumer or producer, sure am interested. But need Kerberos support.

Tell me more about your vision. Even better, draw it in some way :-)

Phil

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 8:43 AM, henry <[henry@callistohouse.club]("""mailto:henry@callistohouse.club""")> wrote:

...

This is a goal of ParrotTalk, to bring bit-compatible communications to Squeak, Pharo and Java. This is not an invocation bridge you speak of but a communications bridge to be able to run against Hadoop or whichever big data needs integration with (Kafka). I had hoped it might be adopted for such. Yet again this is not exactly what you were looking for but yet interesting perhaps?

- HH

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 02:17, [phil@highoctane.be]("""mailto:phil@highoctane.be""") <phil@highoctane.be> wrote:

...

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:

...

There’s other questions that are relevant to me:

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps? No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps? No, the screen’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid. I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps. However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job. That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk. It was writing Java.

The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code". I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers. I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’. An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.

If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work". Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work". They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often. Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.

Why don’t their competitors do it? Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t. Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market. Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.

Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters. When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.

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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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

This all sounds very interesting. What is the idea? Wrap libkrb5 through UFFI or implement it in Smalltalk? On 10/26/2017 04:38 PM, henry wrote:

A Kerberos effort will have to be a group effort. Sideways to my main focus and your all’s main focii.

- HH

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 09:15, henry <henry@callistohouse.club <%22mailto:henry@callistohouse.club%22>> wrote:

I think another good service to integrate well to is Elastic Search.

Of the 4 types of integration, I vote for and step forward to volunteer to help Kerberos integration in Pharo. What to do?

- HH

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 09:06, henry <henry@callistohouse.club <%22%22mailto:henry@callistohouse.club%22%22>> wrote:

I try posting with a smaller image.

""hubbub.jpg""

- HH

——— Original Message ——— Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Local Time: October 26, 2017 8:52 AM UTC Time: October 26, 2017 12:52 PM From: henry@callistohouse.club To: phil@highoctane.be <phil@highoctane.be>, Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>

Perhaps not, or not yet. Perhaps it is the communications foundation for an always-on cloud/bigData control layer.

I would position ParrotTalk as a Kerberos transport. ParrotTalk does 2048-bin key negotiation and subsequent encryption/encoding, both user-supplied. 

Please see the attached diagram, co-locating ParrotTalk with my other components.

ParrotTalk does not do user authentication/authorization. Which means to me that I should consider Kerberos authorization/authentication to establish as an integratable transport to play in bigData.

This means you still need a Kerberos client and I need a Kerberos client. How do we start?

- HH

PS: I did much work integrating Kafka into a framework. I was thinking of inserting msg sending replication to a partition count of replicate queues for sending and receiving Hubbub traffic, thus inserting right where Kerberos is in the diagram. I would love to see client coupling for Kerberos, Kafka and Hadoop, while I figure out proper security to make that group happy with this as a possible control layer solution, forking off jobs.

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 03:14, phil@highoctane.be <phil@highoctane.be <%22%22%22mailto:phil@highoctane.be%22%22%22>> wrote:

Sure. Current main issue is to have Pharo work with Kerberos as secured Hadoop uses the UGI (UserGroupInformation) thing and that is a black hole of crypto things. 

How would you see ParrotTalk work? 

I made a XmppTalk thing (binding for libstrophe) for having Pharo images and other stuff talk together (currently using OpenFire/Gajim/Profanity) FWIW

See https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HTG3GB3xdwlje8wADZPjUQNIyA6tmuxyZz1U... <%22%22%22https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HTG3GB3xdwlje8wADZPjUQNIyA6tmuxyZz1U...>

libstrophe does the SSL thing under the hood (using OpenSSL) and is actively maintained. https://github.com/strophe/libstrophe/blob/master/src/tls_openssl.c <%22%22%22https://github.com/strophe/libstrophe/blob/master/src/tls_openssl.c%22%22%22>

And I currently work with Kafka so, Pharo as a consumer or producer, sure am interested. But need Kerberos support.

Tell me more about your vision. Even better, draw it in some way :-)

Phil

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 8:43 AM, henry <henry@callistohouse.club <%22%22%22mailto:henry@callistohouse.club%22%22%22>> wrote:

This is a goal of ParrotTalk, to bring bit-compatible communications to Squeak, Pharo and Java. This is not an invocation bridge you speak of but a communications bridge to be able to run against Hadoop or whichever big data needs integration with (Kafka). I had hoped it might be adopted for such. Yet again this is not exactly what you were looking for but yet interesting perhaps?

- HH

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 02:17, phil@highoctane.be <%22%22%22mailto:phil@highoctane.be%22%22%22> <phil@highoctane.be> wrote:

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

There are two key Kerberos implementations one can use with Hadoop. One is the FreeIpa/RedHat IdM. The other is ActiveDirectory. I am using FreeIPA which bundles MIT Kerberos/389/sssd and more for making a CA etc. Works wonderfullý well. AD is well ... part of the corporate landdscape. Most of Kerberos needs are done with Java in Hadoop. But details are buried in private Sun classes.. Google Madness beyond the gate hadoop for some Lovecraftian quotes describing the situation along educated info. Phil On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 6:23 PM, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote:

I have no idea which is best. For being able to say we use industry standard Kerberos, calling an accepted implementation seems wise, like OpenSSL support.

- HH

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 11:39, Paulo R. Dellani <dellani@pobox.com> wrote:

This all sounds very interesting. What is the idea? Wrap libkrb5 through UFFI or implement it in Smalltalk?

On 10/26/2017 04:38 PM, henry wrote:

A Kerberos effort will have to be a group effort. Sideways to my main focus and your all’s main focii.

- HH

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 09:15, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote:

I think another good service to integrate well to is Elastic Search.

Of the 4 types of integration, I vote for and step forward to volunteer to help Kerberos integration in Pharo. What to do?

- HH

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 09:06, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote:

I try posting with a smaller image.

[image: ""hubbub.jpg""]

- HH

——— Original Message ——— Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Local Time: October 26, 2017 8:52 AM UTC Time: October 26, 2017 12:52 PM From: henry@callistohouse.club To: phil@highoctane.be <phil@highoctane.be> <phil@highoctane.be>, Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>

Perhaps not, or not yet. Perhaps it is the communications foundation for an always-on cloud/bigData control layer.

I would position ParrotTalk as a Kerberos transport. ParrotTalk does 2048-bin key negotiation and subsequent encryption/encoding, both user-supplied.

Please see the attached diagram, co-locating ParrotTalk with my other components.

ParrotTalk does not do user authentication/authorization. Which means to me that I should consider Kerberos authorization/authentication to establish as an integratable transport to play in bigData.

This means you still need a Kerberos client and I need a Kerberos client. How do we start?

- HH

PS: I did much work integrating Kafka into a framework. I was thinking of inserting msg sending replication to a partition count of replicate queues for sending and receiving Hubbub traffic, thus inserting right where Kerberos is in the diagram. I would love to see client coupling for Kerberos, Kafka and Hadoop, while I figure out proper security to make that group happy with this as a possible control layer solution, forking off jobs.

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 03:14, phil@highoctane.be <phil@highoctane.be> wrote:

Sure. Current main issue is to have Pharo work with Kerberos as secured Hadoop uses the UGI (UserGroupInformation) thing and that is a black hole of crypto things.

How would you see ParrotTalk work?

I made a XmppTalk thing (binding for libstrophe) for having Pharo images and other stuff talk together (currently using OpenFire/Gajim/Profanity) FWIW

See https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HTG3GB3xdwlje8wADZPjUQNIyA6tm uxyZz1UaX5ikEU/edit?usp=sharing

libstrophe does the SSL thing under the hood (using OpenSSL) and is actively maintained. https://github.com/strophe/libstrophe/blob/master/src/tls_openssl.c

And I currently work with Kafka so, Pharo as a consumer or producer, sure am interested. But need Kerberos support.

Tell me more about your vision. Even better, draw it in some way :-)

Phil

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 8:43 AM, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote:

This is a goal of ParrotTalk, to bring bit-compatible communications to Squeak, Pharo and Java. This is not an invocation bridge you speak of but a communications bridge to be able to run against Hadoop or whichever big data needs integration with (Kafka). I had hoped it might be adopted for such. Yet again this is not exactly what you were looking for but yet interesting perhaps?

- HH

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 02:17, phil@highoctane.be < phil@highoctane.be> wrote:

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-na tive-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

One thing I’m 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 ‘inject’ 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 wouldn’t be able to do things that are impossible in Objective-C, and it wouldn’t need to be ‘injected’ in order to run). Every implementation of Objective-C , bar GNU’s useless imitation, compiles to Smalltalk. No surprise that Apple’s 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 don’t have one myself for Android. I’ve tried nearly every version, because I’d 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 ‘throttle’ data that the JVM can’t 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 isn’t 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 ‘hello world’ in Java, then compare: Say ‘hello world’ 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 😊. 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: There’s other questions that are relevant to me:   Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.   Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers”, but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.   The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because “people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code”.  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.   If you’re 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 aren’t 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 “shit has to work”.  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when “shit has to work”.  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.    Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.    Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.    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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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  

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 I’m 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 ‘inject’ 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 wouldn’t be able to do things that are impossible in Objective-C, and it wouldn’t need to be ‘injected’ in order to run). Every implementation of Objective-C , bar GNU’s useless imitation, compiles to Smalltalk. No surprise that Apple’s 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 don’t have one myself for Android. I’ve tried nearly every version, because I’d 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 ‘throttle’ data that the JVM can’t 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 isn’t 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 ‘hello world’ in Java, then compare:

Say ‘hello world’

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 😊.

Tc

Andrew

Sent from Mail <https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for Windows 10

*From: *phil@highoctane.be *Sent: *Thursday, October 26, 2017 2:19 AM *To: *Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> *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:

There’s other questions that are relevant to me:

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps? No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps? No, the screen’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid. I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps. However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job. That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers”, but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk. It was writing Java.

The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because “people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code”. I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers. I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’. An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.

If you’re 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 aren’t 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 “shit has to work”. Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when “shit has to work”. They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often. Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.

Why don’t their competitors do it? Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t. Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market. Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.

Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters. When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.

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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 *doesn’t*, 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

Writing that kind of code is another of the reasons I decided I don’t want to work in anything else 😊. Maybe more important than some of the others, both to myself and to other users. I’ve 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 haven’t 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 weren’t 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. I’m nearly there on a couple of projects – one I’m testing and making final tweaks, another is about 2/3d’s 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 it’s intended to directly help work you are doing in Pharo, it may worthwhile. I’m 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 don’t write nearly as well as Kenneth, for example. Including direct interest from some well known industry people, which can’t hurt. In an indirect way it may even be helpful, but not in the real, direct way decent code is. Capabilities that won’t 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 I’m 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 ‘inject’ 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 wouldn’t be able to do things that are impossible in Objective-C, and it wouldn’t need to be ‘injected’ in order to run).  Every implementation of Objective-C , bar GNU’s useless imitation, compiles to Smalltalk.  No surprise that Apple’s 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 don’t have one myself for Android.  I’ve tried nearly every version, because I’d 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 ‘throttle’ data that the JVM can’t 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 isn’t 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 ‘hello world’ in Java, then compare:   Say ‘hello world’   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 😊.   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: There’s other questions that are relevant to me:   Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.   Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers”, but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.   The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because “people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code”.  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.   If you’re 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 aren’t 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 “shit has to work”.  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when “shit has to work”.  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.    Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.    Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.    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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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      

I’m not working on that specifically, although what I am working on could definitely use that and vice versa, which would increase the capabilities of each. One thing I’m working on is using Vert.x for service registration and discovery, mapped to Apache River (JINI) to propagate that over non-local network segments that require fully authenticated security (as a result, it also provides things such as Kerberos to Pharo apps). The mapping between the two is very straightforward, almost direct, but I’ve added the Synapse micro service bus to control data flows and secure access to remote services. It enables things like automatic configuration/integration of Pharo based mobile apps with newer cars that support that kind of autoconfiguration, since they all use JINI to do so. Thus a Pharo mobile or IoT app can automatically be configured to work with any of the car’s subsystems that are relevant to it. JINI is far more used than people realize, partly because it ‘just works’ and as a result doesn’t get the public ‘squeaky wheel’ effect. The fact that the authors of Vert.x reimplemented half of the features of JINI, in a less comprehensive and less reliable way, rather than just using it (especially considering it’s open source) shows the degree to which that effect is operative. There’s probably a couple dozen other general use cases where the integration will allow Pharo apps to ‘just work’ in a JINI or Vert.x environment, as well as thousands of industry/company specific ones. I’d have to mode-switch to think of them off the top of my head though 😊. Andrew Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: henry Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2017 10:02 AM To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Actual Code to Improve the Pharo environment Hi Andrew, Are you working to bring a Capabilities model to Pharo? This is precisely what I am working to bring with Hubbub, running on top of my ParrotTalk. I derived these from erights.org's ELib and have been working on them for many years. Now that ParrotTalk has stabilized (layer 5) I am shifting to implementing marshalling of layer 6 objects using STON all to run on top of ParrotTalk. Once I get marshalling with scope substitutions, I will debug Hubbub to offer distributed Capabilities. What work are you undertaking? Regards, - HH -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Actual Code to Improve the Pharo environment Local Time: October 28, 2017 9:12 AM UTC Time: October 28, 2017 1:12 PM From: aglynn42@gmail.com To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> Writing that kind of code is another of the reasons I decided I don’t want to work in anything else 😊.  Maybe more important than some of the others, both to myself and to other users.   I’ve 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 haven’t 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 weren’t 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.   I’m nearly there on a couple of projects – one I’m testing and making final tweaks, another is about 2/3d’s 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 it’s intended to directly help work you are doing in Pharo, it may worthwhile.  I’m 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 don’t write nearly as well as Kenneth, for example.  Including direct interest from some well known industry people, which can’t hurt.  In an indirect way it may even be helpful, but not in the real, direct way decent code is.   Capabilities that won’t 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 I’m 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 ‘inject’ 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 wouldn’t be able to do things that are impossible in Objective-C, and it wouldn’t need to be ‘injected’ in order to run).  Every implementation of Objective-C , bar GNU’s useless imitation, compiles to Smalltalk.  No surprise that Apple’s 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 don’t have one myself for Android.  I’ve tried nearly every version, because I’d 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 ‘throttle’ data that the JVM can’t 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 isn’t 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 ‘hello world’ in Java, then compare:   Say ‘hello world’   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 😊.   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: There’s other questions that are relevant to me:   Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.   Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers”, but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.   The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because “people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code”.  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.   If you’re 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 aren’t 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 “shit has to work”.  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when “shit has to work”.  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.    Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.    Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.    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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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            

Here is a diagram of the various components I am working on integrating,. [hubbub.jpg] - HH

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Actual Code to Improve the Pharo environment Local Time: October 28, 2017 1:23 PM UTC Time: October 28, 2017 5:23 PM From: henry@callistohouse.club To: Andrew Glynn <aglynn42@gmail.com>, Any question about pharo iswelcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>

I used to use JINI, a fine system. I didn’t know it had been rereleased as Apache River, I’ve been out of it awhile. This was the broker system that got me interested in Linda. Now I have an eventual Linda project called eLinda, which you can find in the Cryptography repository, no prerequisites needed.

- HH

On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 11:25, Andrew Glynn <aglynn42@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I’m not working on that specifically, although what I am working on could definitely use that and vice versa, which would increase the capabilities of each.

One thing I’m working on is using Vert.x for service registration and discovery, mapped to Apache River (JINI) to propagate that over non-local network segments that require fully authenticated security (as a result, it also provides things such as Kerberos to Pharo apps). The mapping between the two is very straightforward, almost direct, but I’ve added the Synapse micro service bus to control data flows and secure access to remote services.

It enables things like automatic configuration/integration of Pharo based mobile apps with newer cars that support that kind of autoconfiguration, since they all use JINI to do so. Thus a Pharo mobile or IoT app can automatically be configured to work with any of the car’s subsystems that are relevant to it.

JINI is far more used than people realize, partly because it ‘just works’ and as a result doesn’t get the public ‘squeaky wheel’ effect. The fact that the authors of Vert.x reimplemented half of the features of JINI, in a less comprehensive and less reliable way, rather than just using it (especially considering it’s open source) shows the degree to which that effect is operative.

There’s probably a couple dozen other general use cases where the integration will allow Pharo apps to ‘just work’ in a JINI or Vert.x environment, as well as thousands of industry/company specific ones. I’d have to mode-switch to think of them off the top of my head though 😊.

Andrew

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From: [henry](mailto:henry@callistohouse.club) Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2017 10:02 AM To: [Any question about pharo is welcome](mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org) Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Actual Code to Improve the Pharo environment

Hi Andrew,

Are you working to bring a Capabilities model to Pharo? This is precisely what I am working to bring with Hubbub, running on top of my ParrotTalk. I derived these from erights.org's ELib and have been working on them for many years. Now that ParrotTalk has stabilized (layer 5) I am shifting to implementing marshalling of layer 6 objects using STON all to run on top of ParrotTalk. Once I get marshalling with scope substitutions, I will debug Hubbub to offer distributed Capabilities.

What work are you undertaking?

Regards,

- HH

...

-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Actual Code to Improve the Pharo environment

Local Time: October 28, 2017 9:12 AM

UTC Time: October 28, 2017 1:12 PM

From: aglynn42@gmail.com

To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>

Writing that kind of code is another of the reasons I decided I don’t want to work in anything else 😊. Maybe more important than some of the others, both to myself and to other users.

I’ve 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 haven’t 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 weren’t 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.

I’m nearly there on a couple of projects – one I’m testing and making final tweaks, another is about 2/3d’s 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 it’s intended to directly help work you are doing in Pharo, it may worthwhile. I’m 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 don’t write nearly as well as Kenneth, for example. Including direct interest from some well known industry people, which can’t hurt. In an indirect way it may even be helpful, but not in the real, direct way decent code is.

Capabilities that won’t 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

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From: [Stephane Ducasse](mailto:stepharo.self@gmail.com)

Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2017 5:09 AM

To: [Any question about pharo is welcome](mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org)

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 I’m 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 ‘inject’ 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 wouldn’t be able to do things that are impossible in Objective-C, and it wouldn’t need to be ‘injected’ in order to run). Every implementation of Objective-C , bar GNU’s useless imitation, compiles to Smalltalk. No surprise that Apple’s 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 don’t have one myself for Android. I’ve tried nearly every version, because I’d 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 ‘throttle’ data that the JVM can’t 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 isn’t 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 ‘hello world’ in Java, then compare:

Say ‘hello world’

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 😊.

Tc

Andrew

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From: phil@highoctane.be

Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 2:19 AM

To: [Any question about pharo is welcome](mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org)

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:

...

There’s other questions that are relevant to me:

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps? No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps? No, the screen’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid. I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps. However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job. That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk. It was writing Java.

The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code". I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers. I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’. An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.

If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work". Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work". They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often. Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.

Why don’t their competitors do it? Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t. Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market. Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.

Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters. When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.

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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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](tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%200) Fax: [+49 7141 56 10 86 1](tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%201)

I will, although in some ways the two may be more complementary than anything. Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Stephane Ducasse Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2017 5:06 AM To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument 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 I’m 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 ‘inject’ 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 wouldn’t be able to do things that are impossible in Objective-C, and it wouldn’t need to be ‘injected’ in order to run).  Every implementation of Objective-C , bar GNU’s useless imitation, compiles to Smalltalk.  No surprise that Apple’s 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 don’t have one myself for Android.  I’ve tried nearly every version, because I’d 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 ‘throttle’ data that the JVM can’t 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 isn’t 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 ‘hello world’ in Java, then compare:   Say ‘hello world’   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 😊.   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: There’s other questions that are relevant to me:   Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.   Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers”, but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.   The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because “people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code”.  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.   If you’re 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 aren’t 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 “shit has to work”.  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when “shit has to work”.  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.    Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.    Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.    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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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      

Phil, Am 26.10.17 um 08:17 schrieb phil@highoctane.be:

Now we miss the boat on mobile and bigdata, but this is solvable.

You know, "It's solvable, and it's even easy in Smalltalk" has been what we've been shouting down at those worms in the C++/Java swamp for decades. We just never really proved it. We also missed the boat on web. Seaside was the last real innovation in that field, almost 15 years ago. When Javascript took over the frontend, we lost pace.

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.

To it sounds like a big ball of mud to me, but that is opinion ;-)

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.

Yep. As long as there is no mobile, web or big data involved ;-) To me that is not enough for convincing project managers these days, because web, mobile and big data as well ass AI (oh, is that probably no. 4 on our list of missed boats?) are the topics of what we consider future-proof projects... I am not only dissing the Pharo community here, this is a problem for all Smalltalk vendors in my opinion. 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

Btw, I think we gained pace when JS took over the front end, but lost visibility. Nothing is slower than coding a client/server app with the front end in JS. The ‘rise’ of JS is a side effect of the fact that the web was designed, built and continues to be built by ‘coders’ who don’t know enough to be called amateurs. What puts 'coders’ off though is related to way JS is and (mostly doesn’t) work. You can’t just sit down and ‘hack on’ Smalltalk until it ‘sorta kinda’ does what you want. You can’t grab code from some random website and ‘fiddle with it’ until it ‘sorta kinda’ works. ‘Coders’ can’t make it ‘sorta kinda’ work, and they don’t know how to write code that works. One of the better JS programmers I’ve worked with said at one point “Engineers can’t write JavaScript because it doesn’t fit their mentality. I used to be a retoucher, I’d spend hours and hours getting one pixel right. There’s no good reason that one pixel had to be that way, but the image didn’t ‘go’ otherwise. JavaScript is like that, you spend hours and hours messing with it, getting it to work, and at the end you don’t know why it works, nor why it didn’t. That’s not an engineer’s mindset.” Do aviation engineers choose tools based on ‘popularity’? At the same time, would you want your next flight to be on an aircraft running on JavaScript? I wouldn’t eat from a microwave running JavaScript. I’d rather be an engineer than a popularity contestant or a fashion victim. In any case, more often than not it’s management that chooses technologies, generally based on who they have lunch with more than anything else. Andrew Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Dimitris Chloupis Sent: Monday, November 6, 2017 2:35 AM To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Another way of promoting Pharo is copying its advantages to other languages. The ideal way is for people to get straight to Pharo and fall in love with it. But sometimes this may be possible for several reasons. The most usual being that people simple are not in the mood of learning a new language unless they have to. As the saying goes "People love progress , its just that they equally hate change" Introducing similar features to another language, like I did with introducing live coding enviroment to Python with direct reference back to Pharo is a very good way to promote the language. Just because you cannot code in Pharo at your work does not mean you cannot code the Pharo way. Just put a huge tag in your documentation, comments and anywhere you mention your code "inspired by Pharo ( https://pharo.org)" and you will get their attention whether they like the idea of learning a new language or not.  Its like watching an ad, using sex, humour and even unrelated stuff to grab your attention to a product. The idea here is to get the attention, once you do that, the rest follows.  A huge problem with Smalltalk in general is that even though every language, enviroment, tool, IDE has been copying it , it is rarely mentioned. If it did , I have no doubt it would have been masively more popular than it is right now.  On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 9:22 AM jtuchel@objektfabrik.de <jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> wrote: Phil, Am 26.10.17 um 08:17 schrieb phil@highoctane.be:

Now we miss the boat on mobile and bigdata, but this is solvable.

You know, "It's solvable, and it's even easy in Smalltalk" has been what we've been shouting down at those worms in the C++/Java swamp for decades. We just never really proved it. We also missed the boat on web. Seaside was the last real innovation in that field, almost 15 years ago. When Javascript took over the frontend, we lost pace.

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.

To it sounds like a big ball of mud to me, but that is opinion ;-)

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.

Yep. As long as there is no mobile, web or big data involved ;-) To me that is not enough for convincing project managers these days, because web, mobile and big data as well ass AI (oh, is that probably no. 4 on our list of missed boats?) are the topics of what we consider future-proof projects... I am not only dissing the Pharo community here, this is a problem for all Smalltalk vendors in my opinion. 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

Hi Dimitris, you have pointed out some good thoughts. However, for me any technical thing can have two aspects: - solve a problem, provide a product which has value (for get things done) - take the concepts (of applied technics and computer science forward) For me, both things are important. Experience from doing gives new impulses for better concepts, better concepts may help to solve unsolvable problems. I like your example of libraries. Yes, I think too reinventing everything is not necessary. But I believe libraries as „live“ objects providing protocol and capabilities would be an important improvement. For me, Morphic in it’s essence could be great for the AR world to come. So in principle I agree with you, but I hope that we not stop to search also for better concepts in a world, where privacy and self will is called in the age of big data and AI. Just my personal view 😇 Cheers Hans

Am 06.11.2017 um 11:28 schrieb Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.alios@gmail.com>:

all people like popular choices, including engineers.

Engineers may be more careful but they are not known exactly for their talent to innovate.

We are pact animals, we are social animals.

This is far from a coding problem, its pretty much coded right inside our DNA, not just for us but also for any other animal.

And we have our trends too, our resistance to git is an excellent example. A general fixation of avoiding files and especially text files. The unreasonable argument that you need an image to preserve a live coding enviroment. The idea that just because you have access to the complete source code , life becomes easier for some weird way as if people are likely to mess with the internals of a system. That for some weird reason you cannot have access to source code in other languages or that is hard to do so. The notion that live coding is only possible or only easy in Smalltalk. That reimplementing everything in Smalltalk is a great idea. That minimal syntax equals softer learning curve. That Smalltalk is the only sensible way of doing OOP.

Finally but not least, "Alan Kay is god".

People love to stick to their beliefs (me included) and not feel comfortable questioning them. It's no surpise it tooks us hundrends of thousands of years to get to this point.

JS is chosen as a language for the same reason its so hated, its third party libraries. As coders we have to rely a lot more to libraries than we have to rely on languages. Sure a language can solve many potential problem but a powerful library support can practically give you code on a plate. Hence also why JS is practically non existant outside web dev and that is pretty rare for a language.

So sure popularity plays a major role but in the end the preference for JS is not insanity, its the right choice for what it focuses on. A difficult/ not that well designed language + big library support will always be easier to use than a super ease elegant language without such big library support. The time when we were relying on our code and our own libraries has passed long time ago.

...

On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 10:37 AM Andrew Glynn <aglynn42@gmail.com> wrote: Btw, I think we gained pace when JS took over the front end, but lost visibility. Nothing is slower than coding a client/server app with the front end in JS. The ‘rise’ of JS is a side effect of the fact that the web was designed, built and continues to be built by ‘coders’ who don’t know enough to be called amateurs.

What puts 'coders’ off though is related to way JS is and (mostly doesn’t) work. You can’t just sit down and ‘hack on’ Smalltalk until it ‘sorta kinda’ does what you want. You can’t grab code from some random website and ‘fiddle with it’ until it ‘sorta kinda’ works. ‘Coders’ can’t make it ‘sorta kinda’ work, and they don’t know how to write code that works.

One of the better JS programmers I’ve worked with said at one point “Engineers can’t write JavaScript because it doesn’t fit their mentality. I used to be a retoucher, I’d spend hours and hours getting one pixel right. There’s no good reason that one pixel had to be that way, but the image didn’t ‘go’ otherwise. JavaScript is like that, you spend hours and hours messing with it, getting it to work, and at the end you don’t know why it works, nor why it didn’t. That’s not an engineer’s mindset.”

Do aviation engineers choose tools based on ‘popularity’? At the same time, would you want your next flight to be on an aircraft running on JavaScript? I wouldn’t eat from a microwave running JavaScript.

I’d rather be an engineer than a popularity contestant or a fashion victim.

In any case, more often than not it’s management that chooses technologies, generally based on who they have lunch with more than anything else.

Andrew

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Dimitris Chloupis Sent: Monday, November 6, 2017 2:35 AM

To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument

Another way of promoting Pharo is copying its advantages to other languages. The ideal way is for people to get straight to Pharo and fall in love with it. But sometimes this may be possible for several reasons. The most usual being that people simple are not in the mood of learning a new language unless they have to. As the saying goes "People love progress , its just that they equally hate change"

Introducing similar features to another language, like I did with introducing live coding enviroment to Python with direct reference back to Pharo is a very good way to promote the language. Just because you cannot code in Pharo at your work does not mean you cannot code the Pharo way. Just put a huge tag in your documentation, comments and anywhere you mention your code "inspired by Pharo ( https://pharo.org)" and you will get their attention whether they like the idea of learning a new language or not.

Its like watching an ad, using sex, humour and even unrelated stuff to grab your attention to a product. The idea here is to get the attention, once you do that, the rest follows.

A huge problem with Smalltalk in general is that even though every language, enviroment, tool, IDE has been copying it , it is rarely mentioned. If it did , I have no doubt it would have been masively more popular than it is right now.

On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 9:22 AM jtuchel@objektfabrik.de <jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> wrote:

Phil,

Am 26.10.17 um 08:17 schrieb phil@highoctane.be:

...

Now we miss the boat on mobile and bigdata, but this is solvable.

You know, "It's solvable, and it's even easy in Smalltalk" has been what we've been shouting down at those worms in the C++/Java swamp for decades. We just never really proved it. We also missed the boat on web. Seaside was the last real innovation in that field, almost 15 years ago. When Javascript took over the frontend, we lost pace.

...

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.

To it sounds like a big ball of mud to me, but that is opinion ;-)

...

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.

Yep. As long as there is no mobile, web or big data involved ;-) To me that is not enough for convincing project managers these days, because web, mobile and big data as well ass AI (oh, is that probably no. 4 on our list of missed boats?) are the topics of what we consider future-proof projects... I am not only dissing the Pharo community here, this is a problem for all Smalltalk vendors in my opinion.

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

I like your depiction of the situation and arguments, Andrew. The inherent volatility of the software industry due to its tendency to self disruption, as you pointed out, is fertile ground to all kinds of crap, but we as developers should keep our eyes wide open and look for the pearls and gems that grow here and there, like Pharo Smalltalk. Of course my "vision", as a Smalltalker is inherently biased, but as you said, when "shit has to work", I think that we have good cards at our hands. So yesterday we had another meeting and I think I could make a good point for Smalltalk, thanks to all your arguments here at the list. But surely the absolute killer argument is that "this shit really works" :-) As pointed out by several of you, integration is key. For my particular present case, I could successfully integrate the developed tools in the system, a medical imaging processing pipeline, through the command line and the filesystem - so no need for fancy looking web apps at the moment, but it surely will not hurt to have this possibilities - it would be cool to run part of the code at the front end (internet browser), in our case, some pre-processing of medical data before it is sent to the "main processing pipeline" (just one practical example of many other possible applications). This particular task could be done with Javascript, but I am afraid that the necessary libraries are not so good.. Cheers, Paulo On 10/26/2017 12:46 AM, Andrew Glynn wrote:

There’s other questions that are relevant to me:

 

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

 

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers”, but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.

 

The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because “people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code”.  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.

 

If you’re 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 aren’t 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 “shit has to work”.  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when “shit has to work”.  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t. 

 

Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work. 

 

Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’. 

 

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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 /doesn’t/, 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 <mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> <jtuchel@objektfabrik.de <mailto: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

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Andrew, Am 26.10.17 um 00:46 schrieb Andrew Glynn:

There’s other questions that are relevant to me:

I am glad you opened your words with this sentence. Other peoples' mileages may vary a lot.

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Some people can't. I can't. I am making my living with a web based application. And I like it.

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s too small to read anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.>

So you are in the lucky position that neither mobile nor web nor integration matters to you or you have enough resources to do all that stuff yourself. I am envyous. I need to build web pages and people ask me whether we can ship an iPhone App. I do customer-facing stuff and sex sells much more than we like to think. Your comments on the crappiness of libs in other languages is a great fit for Smalltalk. Not invented here, therefor rubbish. We came a long way with this way of thinking. But these rubbish makers dance circles around us while we try to do our first hello world for an iPad. They laugh at us when we try to reinvent MVC on top of Seaside (although MVC is closesly related to Smalltalk). Because they are back home and watch Netflix while we debug our homegrown base libraries that are, of course, much better than theirs because they are written in Smalltalk. I am not arguing that maintaining Smalltalk code is far superior to most technolgies out there. But depending on the needs of our projects we have to learn and use those crappy technologies to accomplish what they offer. Because, sometimes (especially if you have to pay bills), an existing library with flaws is better than none. So if I have to use Javascript or C# or Dart or Swift to do the frontend part of my system, is there still much benefit in using these together with Smalltalk? Or is there - at least from a manager's point of view - not a reasonable amount of sense in choosing the frontend technology also for the logic and compensate the loss in productivity with a gain in avoided complexity? Your answer delivers a lot of food for thought, but I don't buy all of it. And I don't expect you to buy all of mine ;-) Joachim

Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages?  No, because most of them are crap in every language I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid. I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers”, but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.

The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because “people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code”.  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.

If you’re 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 aren’t 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 “shit has to work”.  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when “shit has to work”.  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often. Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.

Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.

Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.

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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 /doesn’t/, 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 <mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> <jtuchel@objektfabrik.de <mailto: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 <mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> Fliederweg 1 http://www.objektfabrik.de D-71640 Ludwigsburg http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 <tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%200>         Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1 <tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%201>

-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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

Your points are, as usual, very accurate. However the percentage of rarely used methods in JavaEE makes those in Morphic look nearly irrelevant. The more important question for me is whether they interfere or not. Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Dimitris Chloupis Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 8:54 AM To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Well all languages have well designed and badly designed libraries , in Pharo you dont even have to look hard just take a look at Morph and Object class and awe at all those irrelevant methods trying to cram in features you will probably never use. Especially my experience with Morphic has been as nightmarish as my experience with MFC. And MFC is a C++ library and made by Microsoft. On the other hand QT is a brilliantly designed GUI API (again for C++) and dont even get me started on DELPHI libraries which to this day I consider top when it comes to OO libraries. together with its IDE (but I never liked its language).  Web dev may be a messy field mainly because it has grown too fast, after the web explosion ,  based on problematic concepts but desktop libraries and as a consequence mobile dev libraries (iOS is a variable of MacoOS, Android a variant of Linux) in a much , much better position and some of them have stellar designs. Mainly because are far more mature with decades of extremely active development. Of course many of those great design are the result of a reaction to bad designs and lessons learned from other APIs. There is no good design without a redesign.  My personal opinion is that as pessimistic it may sound, Smalltalk has very little to offer in the library front. The language is still stellar and live environment is a great concept but from there on there is a decline. Sure if your are low demand kind of person on the library front and dont mind implementing stuff by yourself you wont mind the lack of libraries but most coders , me included , dont have this luxury. Especially making a living with a language is a completely different story from learning it as a hobby,  I think and that's a personal opinion, that Smalltalk goes the wrong direction. It tries to be a do it all language, but we already have an army of do it all languages. I think it would excel as the backbone in big complex projects. Like the Moose project is doing with code analysis and visualization. I think this is an excellent direction to go with Smalltalk. Reflection is the big strength of Smalltalk the ability to communicate with its code in a direct matter. So I think that a Smalltalk implementation that can analyze and visualize code written in other languages would have been a pretty serious reason for people to learn Smalltalk.  I am very happy to see Pharo go towards that direction and yes I would definitely recommend it without hesitation  for code analysis and project management tool. Its no coincidence that we have seen a serious growth in our community. When I joined back in 2011 we all were posting at pharo-dev, pharo-users was a dead zone and then the community grow larger and larger we soon may need a third mailing list.  Code complexity is an issues for all large projects and tools that help manage this without having to convert to another language are very popular.      On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 3:14 PM jtuchel@objektfabrik.de <jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> wrote: Andrew, Am 26.10.17 um 00:46 schrieb Andrew Glynn: There’s other questions that are relevant to me: I am glad you opened your words with this sentence. Other peoples' mileages may vary a lot.

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Some people can't. I can't. I am making my living with a web based application. And I like it.  

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s too small to read anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.> So you are in the lucky position that neither mobile nor web nor integration matters to you or you have enough resources to do all that stuff yourself. I am envyous. I need to build web pages and people ask me whether we can ship an iPhone App. I do customer-facing stuff and sex sells much more than we like to think.

Your comments on the crappiness of libs in other languages is a great fit for Smalltalk. Not invented here, therefor rubbish. We came a long way with this way of thinking. But these rubbish makers dance circles around us while we try to do our first hello world for an iPad. They laugh at us when we try to reinvent MVC on top of Seaside (although MVC is closesly related to Smalltalk). Because they are back home and watch Netflix while we debug our homegrown base libraries that are, of course, much better than theirs because they are written in Smalltalk. I am not arguing that maintaining Smalltalk code is far superior to most technolgies out there. But depending on the needs of our projects we have to learn and use those crappy technologies to accomplish what they offer. Because, sometimes (especially if you have to pay bills), an existing library with flaws is better than none. So if I have to use Javascript or C# or Dart or Swift to do the frontend part of my system, is there still much benefit in using these together with Smalltalk? Or is there - at least from a manager's point of view - not a reasonable amount of sense in choosing the frontend technology also for the logic and compensate the loss in productivity with a gain in avoided complexity? Your answer delivers a lot of food for thought, but I don't buy all of it. And I don't expect you to buy all of mine ;-) Joachim     Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages?  No, because most of them are crap in every language I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers”, but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.   The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because “people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code”.  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.   If you’re 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 aren’t 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 “shit has to work”.  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when “shit has to work”.  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.    Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.    Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.    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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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   -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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

On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 6:10 AM Andrew Glynn <aglynn42@gmail.com> wrote:

Web dev is a messy field. Not because it has grown too fast, but because it was designed by amateurs, developed by amateurs, and continues to be so, while depending on an underlying expertly designed system, the internet.

Non sense. Companies have been heavily involved in the developing of the web since day one. Javascript was not designed by an amateur and pretty much no web dev technologies out there not only are produced since day 1 from professional coders , web standards committess played a crucial role in the developing of web technologies. The web has always been a huge cash cow. The very fact that Javascript has the name Java is not as many developers will be quick to point unrelated Java. It is very much related. . Sun for a considerable amount of time was working on Javascript as a scripting engine targeting the web working hand in hand with Java. The relationship was sort lived but for a very long time Java was the de facto language for developing powerful web application / websites. The well known Java applets that exist even today. The reason why the web followed its own road is quite sensible. The internet was viewed as nothing more than a display of documents and made sense to use a document format (HTML) for it at the time. It was easy and accesible to anyone. None could predict the explosion of the web at the time and the future needs for much greater degree of dynamism. Neither could I and I am vicious critic of web dev. The technology evolved very fast that not even up for debate, good designs require redesigns. Redesigns require time. The web was nothing really new neither was the internet. BBS were dominating online communication and function in a very similar way that the web did later on providing, email, messages, forumes, download directories, blog posts, articles and a wealth of information through the use of a model and a regular telophone line. BBS were based on desktop technology and far better designed but they could not keep up with the incrasing demands of massive online communication so the web and the internet ignated even though internet was create far earlier than BBS. Much less likely to find cat videos because BBS was based on P2P kind of technology and was working on very limited hardware where every byte was precious. It was the failure of desktop technologies to adjust to the need for a web that lead to its seperate evolution. Java was the only language that took a serious interest into web developing and even Java was unwilling to adjust to the needs of the web leading to the massive failure of the Java applet. On the other hand Flash that was specifically designed for the web , flourished for many years till HTML and JS finally caught up. Amateurs also play a very importan role in the evolution of graphics and guis. Teenage hackers were the ones to ignite the trend of computer graphics that lead to the establishment of GUI and 3d graphics as well as computer audio even though those technologies have existed far earlier it was their innovation that managed to take advantage of clever solution to overcome extreme limitations of the hardware. This happened through the developing of "demos" giving rise to a completely new community of extrmely knowledgable amateurs knows as "demoscene" and hackers. 3d graphics to this day remain the most fast moving / evolving field of computer science challanged only by AI. Plus Amateurs play a vital role in many other fields like Astronomy , their contribution is so substabtial that many celestial bodies are named after them. Amateurs have usually far higher level of knowledge of a field mainly because they tend to avoid specialisation and they do not operate on the time constraints or have to fight a backward thinking management department that want to do things "the popular" way. For similar reason they pay far more respect to designs as well. So it was both the failure of desktop to take into serious consideration the new web needs and the rapid evolution of the web based on the format that it was already problematic. It was companies themselves that hindered and keep hindering its evolution with being stuck on bad design for the shake of backward compatibility. On the other hand desktop has it own share of ugliness and "amateurism" biggest example being MFC , Microsoft's Official GUI API, that was so ugly and heavily disliked that none even question the existence of HTML because no coder in his right mind could consider imposing such a terrible design to a new technology. On similar note web is not all that bad, JS has heavily improved as a language , HTML has become extremely flexible and there are many well designed libraries like Bootstrap , D3 etc . Also desktop language learned their lesson and now fully embreace web dev at least on the back end. Finally nowdays we see the merging of web and desktop technlogies (and the branch of desktop development known as "mobile development") that has brought more sanity and uniformity into the development process. Unfortunately companies still play a very big role in the glacial evolution of the web that is fortunately dimisihing with the emergence of free software.

I have heard this summarized by the term: "build it and they will come". I think the data visualization aspect is where Pharo entering BigData space could really payoff. That comes down to data manipulation. Can Pharo read Avro? - HH On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 14:00, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <offray.luna@mutabit.com> wrote:

Thanks a lot Paulo for starting this thread and all the participants for the clever and enlightening answers. I just want to add my two cents. On 26/10/17 07:53, Dimitris Chloupis wrote: > > My personal opinion is that as pessimistic it may sound, Smalltalk has > very little to offer in the library front. The language is still > stellar and live environment is a great concept but from there on > there is a decline. Sure if your are low demand kind of person on the > library front and dont mind implementing stuff by yourself you wont > mind the lack of libraries but most coders , me included , dont have > this luxury. Especially making a living with a language is a > completely different story from learning it as a hobby, > > I think and that's a personal opinion, that Smalltalk goes the wrong > direction. It tries to be a do it all language, but we already have an > army of do it all languages. I think it would excel as the backbone in > big complex projects. Like the Moose project is doing with code > analysis and visualization. I think this is an excellent direction to > go with Smalltalk. Reflection is the big strength of Smalltalk the > ability to communicate with its code in a direct matter. So I think > that a Smalltalk implementation that can analyze and visualize code > written in other languages would have been a pretty serious reason for > people to learn Smalltalk. > > I am very happy to see Pharo go towards that direction and yes I would > definitely recommend it without hesitation for code analysis and > project management tool. Its no coincidence that we have seen a > serious growth in our community. When I joined back in 2011 we all > were posting at pharo-dev, pharo-users was a dead zone and then the > community grow larger and larger we soon may need a third mailing list. > > Code complexity is an issues for all large projects and tools that > help manage this without having to convert to another language are > very popular. About finding niche where you can learn Pharo and make a living from it, I think that I may be behind a sweet spot in the field of reproducible research and data storytelling and visualization, for different fields like activism, journalism, science and engineering. I'm "working in my PhD", so I don't get paid for using Pharo & friends (well if fact I'm in a loan to finish my PhD), but using Pharo have allowed my to get more dynamic results that with previous technologies (mostly Python and Web ones). By being able to prototype quickly I have improved my research experience and results, which is a way to improve research (self) funding. Also, activists, journalist, researchers and other novices interested in data storytelling and visualization, care little about popularity of the language or being able to make apps (mobile or web). What they care is about being able to tell the story and Pharo, agile visualization and moldable tools, have a lot to offer in this front. They're easy to learn and to adapt to fit the needs of the problems behind those stories, as we have done with Grafoscopio[1]. So, is nice to be part of a "trend", (data science, reproducible research, data storytelling and data visualization) but not being part of one that doesn't give you the freedom to use tools that matter to you, because of the ideas they embody and the added value they create for you and your community. [1] http://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/index.en.html Also, being in Latin America, means that we can bootstrap ourselves into alternative futures by using alternative (digital) infrastructures and tools, without to much worry about the deep investments in money and/or expertise on bloated/popular technologies (we don't have such investments here!). We can learn from the experience of the "Global North", without following that path, but by taking a critical approach to it (for example regarding overcomplex, non-dynamic, bloated technologies). On the community front, I think is important to do something to break the circular logic of popularity: Smalltalk is unpopular, so we don't get developers, so we don't have libraries, and this makes such tech unpopular. We're a nascent community of data storytellers and activists learning how to use Pharo to tell our voices and how to modify the tools to tell them in more potent/fluid ways. We have done this mostly by ourselves, without any support from industry or government and mostly none from academy. Despite of the fragility of our hackerspace[2], this has been done in a consistent way since almost two years[3] (I started to learn Pharo, in a sparse way, 3 years ago). So, there are ways to break the circular logic and bootstrap communities around the advantages of the Pharo/Smalltalk environment in places where it can be aligned to the trends but also take a critical approach to them by providing added value. [2] http://hackbo.co/ [3] http://mutabit.com/dataweek/ So finding a niche and bootstrapping tools and communities in it, seems a way to deploy the Smalltalk Argument by example into the world, which is a pretty powerful way to argument against skeptics. Cheers, Offray

How could I get started documenting my components with Grafoscopio? I am interested in learning. I just got ASN.1 lengths right, in Java. I am looking to Pharo and Java with an encrypted connection between them. - HH On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 16:59, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <[offray.luna@mutabit.com]("mailto:offray.luna@mutabit.com")> wrote:

Well is more "build and they will come, if you build also a community who will come", which is hard, but data storytelling and visualization as filed and dynamic moldable tools give us a advantage point to tackle such hard problems.

Cheers,

Offray

On 29/10/17 13:13, henry wrote:

...

I have heard this summarized by the term: "build it and they will come". I think the data visualization aspect is where Pharo entering BigData space could really payoff. That comes down to data manipulation. Can Pharo read Avro?

- HH

On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 14:00, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas < [offray.luna@mutabit.com]("mailto:offray.luna@mutabit.com")> wrote:

...

Thanks a lot Paulo for starting this thread and all the participants for the clever and enlightening answers. I just want to add my two cents. On 26/10/17 07:53, Dimitris Chloupis wrote: > > My personal opinion is that as pessimistic it may sound, Smalltalk has > very little to offer in the library front. The language is still > stellar and live environment is a great concept but from there on > there is a decline. Sure if your are low demand kind of person on the > library front and dont mind implementing stuff by yourself you wont > mind the lack of libraries but most coders , me included , dont have > this luxury. Especially making a living with a language is a > completely different story from learning it as a hobby, > > I think and that’s a personal opinion, that Smalltalk goes the wrong > direction. It tries to be a do it all language, but we already have an > army of do it all languages. I think it would excel as the backbone in > big complex projects. Like the Moose project is doing with code > analysis and visualization. I think this is an excellent direction to > go with Smalltalk. Reflection is the big strength of Smalltalk the > ability to communicate with its code in a direct matter. So I think > that a Smalltalk implementation that can analyze and visualize code > written in other languages would have been a pretty serious reason for > people to learn Smalltalk. > > I am very happy to see Pharo go towards that direction and yes I would > definitely recommend it without hesitation for code analysis and > project management tool. Its no coincidence that we have seen a > serious growth in our community. When I joined back in 2011 we all > were posting at pharo-dev, pharo-users was a dead zone and then the > community grow larger and larger we soon may need a third mailing list. > > Code complexity is an issues for all large projects and tools that > help manage this without having to convert to another language are > very popular. About finding niche where you can learn Pharo and make a living from it, I think that I may be behind a sweet spot in the field of reproducible research and data storytelling and visualization, for different fields like activism, journalism, science and engineering. I’m "working in my PhD", so I don’t get paid for using Pharo & friends (well if fact I’m in a loan to finish my PhD), but using Pharo have allowed my to get more dynamic results that with previous technologies (mostly Python and Web ones). By being able to prototype quickly I have improved my research experience and results, which is a way to improve research (self) funding. Also, activists, journalist, researchers and other novices interested in data storytelling and visualization, care little about popularity of the language or being able to make apps (mobile or web). What they care is about being able to tell the story and Pharo, agile visualization and moldable tools, have a lot to offer in this front. They’re easy to learn and to adapt to fit the needs of the problems behind those stories, as we have done with Grafoscopio[1]. So, is nice to be part of a "trend", (data science, reproducible research, data storytelling and data visualization) but not being part of one that doesn’t give you the freedom to use tools that matter to you, because of the ideas they embody and the added value they create for you and your community. [1] [http://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/index.en.html]("http://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/index.en.html") Also, being in Latin America, means that we can bootstrap ourselves into alternative futures by using alternative (digital) infrastructures and tools, without to much worry about the deep investments in money and/or expertise on bloated/popular technologies (we don’t have such investments here!). We can learn from the experience of the "Global North", without following that path, but by taking a critical approach to it (for example regarding overcomplex, non-dynamic, bloated technologies). On the community front, I think is important to do something to break the circular logic of popularity: Smalltalk is unpopular, so we don’t get developers, so we don’t have libraries, and this makes such tech unpopular. We’re a nascent community of data storytellers and activists learning how to use Pharo to tell our voices and how to modify the tools to tell them in more potent/fluid ways. We have done this mostly by ourselves, without any support from industry or government and mostly none from academy. Despite of the fragility of our hackerspace[2], this has been done in a consistent way since almost two years[3] (I started to learn Pharo, in a sparse way, 3 years ago). So, there are ways to break the circular logic and bootstrap communities around the advantages of the Pharo/Smalltalk environment in places where it can be aligned to the trends but also take a critical approach to them by providing added value. [2] [http://hackbo.co/]("http://hackbo.co/") [3] [http://mutabit.com/dataweek/]("http://mutabit.com/dataweek/") So finding a niche and bootstrapping tools and communities in it, seems a way to deploy the Smalltalk Argument by example into the world, which is a pretty powerful way to argument against skeptics. Cheers, Offray

Pharo can read Avro when this will be UFFI'ed https://avro.apache.org/docs/1.7.3/api/c/index.html But that is eminently doable. Phiil On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 7:13 PM, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote:

I have heard this summarized by the term: "build it and they will come". I think the data visualization aspect is where Pharo entering BigData space could really payoff. That comes down to data manipulation. Can Pharo read Avro?

- HH

On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 14:00, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas < offray.luna@mutabit.com> wrote:

Thanks a lot Paulo for starting this thread and all the participants for the clever and enlightening answers. I just want to add my two cents. On 26/10/17 07:53, Dimitris Chloupis wrote: > > My personal opinion is that as pessimistic it may sound, Smalltalk has > very little to offer in the library front. The language is still > stellar and live environment is a great concept but from there on > there is a decline. Sure if your are low demand kind of person on the > library front and dont mind implementing stuff by yourself you wont > mind the lack of libraries but most coders , me included , dont have > this luxury. Especially making a living with a language is a > completely different story from learning it as a hobby, >

...

I think and that's a personal opinion, that Smalltalk goes the wrong > direction. It tries to be a do it all language, but we already have an > army of do it all languages. I think it would excel as the backbone in > big complex projects. Like the Moose project is doing with code > analysis and visualization. I think this is an excellent direction to > go with Smalltalk. Reflection is the big strength of Smalltalk the > ability to communicate with its code in a direct matter. So I think > that a Smalltalk implementation that can analyze and visualize code > written in other languages would have been a pretty serious reason for > people to learn Smalltalk. > > I am very happy to see Pharo go towards that direction and yes I would > definitely recommend it without hesitation for code analysis and > project management tool. Its no coincidence that we have seen a > serious growth in our community. When I joined back in 2011 we all > were posting at pharo-dev, pharo-users was a dead zone and then the > community grow larger and larger we soon may need a third mailing list. > > Code complexity is an issues for all large projects and tools that > help manage this without having to convert to another language are > very popular. About finding niche where you can learn Pharo and make a living from it, I think that I may be behind a sweet spot in the field of reproducible research and data storytelling and visualization, for different fields like activism, journalism, science and engineering. I'm "working in my PhD", so I don't get paid for using Pharo & friends (well if fact I'm in a loan to finish my PhD), but using Pharo have allowed my to get more dynamic results that with previous technologies (mostly Python and Web ones). By being able to prototype quickly I have improved my research experience and results, which is a way to improve research (self) funding. Also, activists, journalist, researchers and other novices interested in data storytelling and visualization, care little about popularity of the language or being able to make apps (mobile or web). What they care is about being able to tell the story and Pharo, agile visualization and moldable tools, have a lot to offer in this front. They're easy to learn and to adapt to fit the needs of the problems behind those stories, as we have done with Grafoscopio[1]. So, is nice to be part of a "trend", (data science, reproducible research, data storytelling and data visualization) but not being part of one that doesn't give you the freedom to use tools that matter to you, because of the ideas they embody and the added value they create for you and your community. [1] http://mutabit.com/ grafoscopio/index.en.html Also, being in Latin America, means that we can bootstrap ourselves into alternative futures by using alternative (digital) infrastructures and tools, without to much worry about the deep investments in money and/or expertise on bloated/popular technologies (we don't have such investments here!). We can learn from the experience of the "Global North", without following that path, but by taking a critical approach to it (for example regarding overcomplex, non-dynamic, bloated technologies). On the community front, I think is important to do something to break the circular logic of popularity: Smalltalk is unpopular, so we don't get developers, so we don't have libraries, and this makes such tech unpopular. We're a nascent community of data storytellers and activists learning how to use Pharo to tell our voices and how to modify the tools to tell them in more potent/fluid ways. We have done this mostly by ourselves, without any support from industry or government and mostly none from academy. Despite of the fragility of our hackerspace[2], this has been done in a consistent way since almost two years[3] (I started to learn Pharo, in a sparse way, 3 years ago). So, there are ways to break the circular logic and bootstrap communities around the advantages of the Pharo/Smalltalk environment in places where it can be aligned to the trends but also take a critical approach to them by providing added value. [2] http://hackbo.co/ [3] http://mutabit.com/dataweek/ So finding a niche and bootstrapping tools and communities in it, seems a way to deploy the Smalltalk Argument by example into the world, which is a pretty powerful way to argument against skeptics. Cheers, Offray

I’m not claiming I don’t or haven’t been affected, only that I no long allow myself to be. Does that cause issues? Of course. But I’d rather deal with those than do things I don’t enjoy. However I only got to that point after 26 years in the industry, so I don’t expect that everyone will feel that way. Cheers Andrew Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: jtuchel@objektfabrik.de Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 8:14 AM To: pharo-users@lists.pharo.org Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Andrew, Am 26.10.17 um 00:46 schrieb Andrew Glynn: There’s other questions that are relevant to me: I am glad you opened your words with this sentence. Other peoples' mileages may vary a lot.

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Some people can't. I can't. I am making my living with a web based application. And I like it.  

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s too small to read anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.>

So you are in the lucky position that neither mobile nor web nor integration matters to you or you have enough resources to do all that stuff yourself. I am envyous. I need to build web pages and people ask me whether we can ship an iPhone App. I do customer-facing stuff and sex sells much more than we like to think. Your comments on the crappiness of libs in other languages is a great fit for Smalltalk. Not invented here, therefor rubbish. We came a long way with this way of thinking. But these rubbish makers dance circles around us while we try to do our first hello world for an iPad. They laugh at us when we try to reinvent MVC on top of Seaside (although MVC is closesly related to Smalltalk). Because they are back home and watch Netflix while we debug our homegrown base libraries that are, of course, much better than theirs because they are written in Smalltalk. I am not arguing that maintaining Smalltalk code is far superior to most technolgies out there. But depending on the needs of our projects we have to learn and use those crappy technologies to accomplish what they offer. Because, sometimes (especially if you have to pay bills), an existing library with flaws is better than none. So if I have to use Javascript or C# or Dart or Swift to do the frontend part of my system, is there still much benefit in using these together with Smalltalk? Or is there - at least from a manager's point of view - not a reasonable amount of sense in choosing the frontend technology also for the logic and compensate the loss in productivity with a gain in avoided complexity? Your answer delivers a lot of food for thought, but I don't buy all of it. And I don't expect you to buy all of mine ;-) Joachim     Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages?  No, because most of them are crap in every language I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers”, but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.   The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because “people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code”.  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.   If you’re 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 aren’t 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 “shit has to work”.  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when “shit has to work”.  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.    Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.    Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.    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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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   -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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

How about Kerberos? Can we get a team to look closely at bringing integration for enterprise users? That would be helpful, or can you just put it behind a Kerberos wrapper? If that would work, collecting a demo, that could unlock more corporate wallets , for investment. - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:41, henry <[henry@callistohouse.club]("mailto:henry@callistohouse.club")> wrote:

How is there no steering committee to accumulate wrapping 3rd party libraries in Alien to gain benefits of code in other languages? Do not assume that code is not extremely well written in that particular language for that particular task and that particular deployment mechanism.

Can Pharo be called as a shared library from Java JNA?

- HH

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 15:47, Andrew Glynn <[aglynn42@gmail.com]("mailto:aglynn42@gmail.com")> wrote:

...

I’m not claiming I don’t or haven’t been affected, only that I no long allow myself to be. Does that cause issues? Of course. But I’d rather deal with those than do things I don’t enjoy. However I only got to that point after 26 years in the industry, so I don’t expect that everyone will feel that way.

Cheers

Andrew

Sent from [Mail]("https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986") for Windows 10

From: [jtuchel@objektfabrik.de]("mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de") Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 8:14 AM To: [pharo-users@lists.pharo.org]("mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org") Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument

Andrew,

Am 26.10.17 um 00:46 schrieb Andrew Glynn:

...

There’s other questions that are relevant to me:

I am glad you opened your words with this sentence. Other peoples’ mileages may vary a lot.

...

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps? No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Some people can’t. I can’t. I am making my living with a web based application. And I like it.

...

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps? No, the screen’s too small to read anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.>

So you are in the lucky position that neither mobile nor web nor integration matters to you or you have enough resources to do all that stuff yourself. I am envyous. I need to build web pages and people ask me whether we can ship an iPhone App. I do customer-facing stuff and sex sells much more than we like to think.

Your comments on the crappiness of libs in other languages is a great fit for Smalltalk. Not invented here, therefor rubbish. We came a long way with this way of thinking. But these rubbish makers dance circles around us while we try to do our first hello world for an iPad. They laugh at us when we try to reinvent MVC on top of Seaside (although MVC is closesly related to Smalltalk). Because they are back home and watch Netflix while we debug our homegrown base libraries that are, of course, much better than theirs because they are written in Smalltalk.

I am not arguing that maintaining Smalltalk code is far superior to most technolgies out there. But depending on the needs of our projects we have to learn and use those crappy technologies to accomplish what they offer. Because, sometimes (especially if you have to pay bills), an existing library with flaws is better than none.

So if I have to use Javascript or C# or Dart or Swift to do the frontend part of my system, is there still much benefit in using these together with Smalltalk? Or is there - at least from a manager’s point of view - not a reasonable amount of sense in choosing the frontend technology also for the logic and compensate the loss in productivity with a gain in avoided complexity?

Your answer delivers a lot of food for thought, but I don’t buy all of it. And I don’t expect you to buy all of mine ;-)

Joachim

...

Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages? No, because most of them are crap in every language I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid. I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps. However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job. That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk. It was writing Java.

The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code". I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers. I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’. An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.

If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work". Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work". They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often. Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.

Why don’t their competitors do it? Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t. Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market. Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.

Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters. When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.

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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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>]("mailto:pharo-users-bounces@lists.pharo.org") on behalf of David Mason [<dmason@ryerson.ca>]("mailto:dmason@ryerson.ca") Reply-To: Any question about pharo is welcome [<pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>]("mailto: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>]("mailto: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]("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]("mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de") <[jtuchel@objektfabrik.de]("mailto: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]("mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de") Fliederweg 1 [http://www.objektfabrik.de]("http://www.objektfabrik.de") D-71640 Ludwigsburg [http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com]("http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com") Telefon: [+49 7141 56 10 86 0]("tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%200") Fax: [+49 7141 56 10 86 1]("tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%201")

—

————————————————————————

Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel [mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de]("mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de")

Fliederweg 1 [http://www.objektfabrik.de]("http://www.objektfabrik.de")

D-71640 Ludwigsburg [http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com]("http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com")

Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1

An easy way of accomplishing what you want is to use Stamp to communicate with Synapse. It also has the advantage of being able to throttle queries that are too fast for the JVM to process. I’ve used precisely that method a number of times to connect to Hadoop. Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: henry Sent: Friday, October 27, 2017 5:03 PM To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Elastic search JSON integration would be another good one. I heard there was a Kafka integration, is that true? Where could I find that, I used to use Kafka. Kafka is a great event channel for input to BigData. Using Kafka, it is well in crafting a Lamda Architecture. Imagine Pharo where Storm resides. - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:51, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote:  How about Kerberos? Can we get a team to look closely at bringing integration for enterprise users? That would be helpful, or can you just put it behind a Kerberos wrapper? If that would work, collecting a demo, that could unlock more corporate wallets , for investment. - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:41, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote: How is there no steering committee to accumulate wrapping 3rd party libraries in Alien to gain benefits of code in other languages? Do not assume that code is not extremely well written in that particular language for that particular task and that particular deployment mechanism. Can Pharo be called as a shared library from Java JNA? - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 15:47, Andrew Glynn <aglynn42@gmail.com> wrote: I’m not claiming I don’t or haven’t been affected, only that I no long allow myself to be.  Does that cause issues?  Of course.  But I’d rather deal with those than do things I don’t enjoy.  However I only got to that point after 26 years in the industry, so I don’t expect that everyone will feel that way.   Cheers Andrew   Sent from Mail for Windows 10   From: jtuchel@objektfabrik.de Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 8:14 AM To: pharo-users@lists.pharo.org Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument   Andrew, Am 26.10.17 um 00:46 schrieb Andrew Glynn: There’s other questions that are relevant to me: I am glad you opened your words with this sentence. Other peoples’ mileages may vary a lot.

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.   Some people can’t. I can’t. I am making my living with a web based application. And I like it.   Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s too small to read anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.>

So you are in the lucky position that neither mobile nor web nor integration matters to you or you have enough resources to do all that stuff yourself. I am envyous. I need to build web pages and people ask me whether we can ship an iPhone App. I do customer-facing stuff and sex sells much more than we like to think. Your comments on the crappiness of libs in other languages is a great fit for Smalltalk. Not invented here, therefor rubbish. We came a long way with this way of thinking. But these rubbish makers dance circles around us while we try to do our first hello world for an iPad. They laugh at us when we try to reinvent MVC on top of Seaside (although MVC is closesly related to Smalltalk). Because they are back home and watch Netflix while we debug our homegrown base libraries that are, of course, much better than theirs because they are written in Smalltalk. I am not arguing that maintaining Smalltalk code is far superior to most technolgies out there. But depending on the needs of our projects we have to learn and use those crappy technologies to accomplish what they offer. Because, sometimes (especially if you have to pay bills), an existing library with flaws is better than none. So if I have to use Javascript or C# or Dart or Swift to do the frontend part of my system, is there still much benefit in using these together with Smalltalk? Or is there - at least from a manager’s point of view - not a reasonable amount of sense in choosing the frontend technology also for the logic and compensate the loss in productivity with a gain in avoided complexity? Your answer delivers a lot of food for thought, but I don’t buy all of it. And I don’t expect you to buy all of mine ;-) Joachim     Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages?  No, because most of them are crap in every language I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.   The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code".  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.   If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work".  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work".  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.    Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.    Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.    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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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     — ———————————————————————— 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    

Unfortunately I can’t make it available since it was a government project, but I used Pharo to do streaming analytics on XML streams from Cisco ASR’s, and the analyzed data was streamed directly to Hadoop, which was magnitudes faster than Spark, Storm or Kafka, never mind HDB or the PostgreSQL overlay. Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: henry Sent: Friday, October 27, 2017 5:03 PM To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Elastic search JSON integration would be another good one. I heard there was a Kafka integration, is that true? Where could I find that, I used to use Kafka. Kafka is a great event channel for input to BigData. Using Kafka, it is well in crafting a Lamda Architecture. Imagine Pharo where Storm resides. - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:51, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote:  How about Kerberos? Can we get a team to look closely at bringing integration for enterprise users? That would be helpful, or can you just put it behind a Kerberos wrapper? If that would work, collecting a demo, that could unlock more corporate wallets , for investment. - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:41, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote: How is there no steering committee to accumulate wrapping 3rd party libraries in Alien to gain benefits of code in other languages? Do not assume that code is not extremely well written in that particular language for that particular task and that particular deployment mechanism. Can Pharo be called as a shared library from Java JNA? - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 15:47, Andrew Glynn <aglynn42@gmail.com> wrote: I’m not claiming I don’t or haven’t been affected, only that I no long allow myself to be.  Does that cause issues?  Of course.  But I’d rather deal with those than do things I don’t enjoy.  However I only got to that point after 26 years in the industry, so I don’t expect that everyone will feel that way.   Cheers Andrew   Sent from Mail for Windows 10   From: jtuchel@objektfabrik.de Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 8:14 AM To: pharo-users@lists.pharo.org Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument   Andrew, Am 26.10.17 um 00:46 schrieb Andrew Glynn: There’s other questions that are relevant to me: I am glad you opened your words with this sentence. Other peoples’ mileages may vary a lot.

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.   Some people can’t. I can’t. I am making my living with a web based application. And I like it.   Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s too small to read anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.>

So you are in the lucky position that neither mobile nor web nor integration matters to you or you have enough resources to do all that stuff yourself. I am envyous. I need to build web pages and people ask me whether we can ship an iPhone App. I do customer-facing stuff and sex sells much more than we like to think. Your comments on the crappiness of libs in other languages is a great fit for Smalltalk. Not invented here, therefor rubbish. We came a long way with this way of thinking. But these rubbish makers dance circles around us while we try to do our first hello world for an iPad. They laugh at us when we try to reinvent MVC on top of Seaside (although MVC is closesly related to Smalltalk). Because they are back home and watch Netflix while we debug our homegrown base libraries that are, of course, much better than theirs because they are written in Smalltalk. I am not arguing that maintaining Smalltalk code is far superior to most technolgies out there. But depending on the needs of our projects we have to learn and use those crappy technologies to accomplish what they offer. Because, sometimes (especially if you have to pay bills), an existing library with flaws is better than none. So if I have to use Javascript or C# or Dart or Swift to do the frontend part of my system, is there still much benefit in using these together with Smalltalk? Or is there - at least from a manager’s point of view - not a reasonable amount of sense in choosing the frontend technology also for the logic and compensate the loss in productivity with a gain in avoided complexity? Your answer delivers a lot of food for thought, but I don’t buy all of it. And I don’t expect you to buy all of mine ;-) Joachim     Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages?  No, because most of them are crap in every language I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.   The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code".  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.   If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work".  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work".  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.    Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.    Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.    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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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     — ———————————————————————— 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    

I looked and was not able to find it. Which version of Pharo are we talking about? What is the name of the kafka integration? - HH

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Local Time: October 27, 2017 11:10 PM UTC Time: October 28, 2017 3:10 AM From: aglynn42@gmail.com To: henry <henry@callistohouse.club>, Any question about pharo iswelcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>

The Kafka integration is right in the Pharo catalog.

Sent from [Mail](https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986) for Windows 10

From: [henry](mailto:henry@callistohouse.club) Sent: Friday, October 27, 2017 5:03 PM To: [Any question about pharo is welcome](mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org) Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument

Elastic search JSON integration would be another good one. I heard there was a Kafka integration, is that true? Where could I find that, I used to use Kafka.

Kafka is a great event channel for input to BigData. Using Kafka, it is well in crafting a Lamda Architecture. Imagine Pharo where Storm resides.

[webkit-fake-url://502df029-af7a-484e-b157-43970b30a0a1/imagejpeg]

- HH

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:51, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote:

...

How about Kerberos? Can we get a team to look closely at bringing integration for enterprise users? That would be helpful, or can you just put it behind a Kerberos wrapper? If that would work, collecting a demo, that could unlock more corporate wallets , for investment.

- HH

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:41, henry <[henry@callistohouse.club](%22mailto:henry@callistohouse.club%22)> wrote:

...

How is there no steering committee to accumulate wrapping 3rd party libraries in Alien to gain benefits of code in other languages? Do not assume that code is not extremely well written in that particular language for that particular task and that particular deployment mechanism.

Can Pharo be called as a shared library from Java JNA?

- HH

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 15:47, Andrew Glynn <[aglynn42@gmail.com](%22mailto:aglynn42@gmail.com%22)> wrote:

...

I’m not claiming I don’t or haven’t been affected, only that I no long allow myself to be. Does that cause issues? Of course. But I’d rather deal with those than do things I don’t enjoy. However I only got to that point after 26 years in the industry, so I don’t expect that everyone will feel that way.

Cheers

Andrew

Sent from [Mail](%22https:/go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986%22) for Windows 10

From: [jtuchel@objektfabrik.de](%22mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de%22) Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 8:14 AM To: [pharo-users@lists.pharo.org](%22mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org%22) Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument

Andrew,

Am 26.10.17 um 00:46 schrieb Andrew Glynn:

...

There’s other questions that are relevant to me:

I am glad you opened your words with this sentence. Other peoples’ mileages may vary a lot.

...

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps? No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Some people can’t. I can’t. I am making my living with a web based application. And I like it.

...

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps? No, the screen’s too small to read anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.>

So you are in the lucky position that neither mobile nor web nor integration matters to you or you have enough resources to do all that stuff yourself. I am envyous. I need to build web pages and people ask me whether we can ship an iPhone App. I do customer-facing stuff and sex sells much more than we like to think.

Your comments on the crappiness of libs in other languages is a great fit for Smalltalk. Not invented here, therefor rubbish. We came a long way with this way of thinking. But these rubbish makers dance circles around us while we try to do our first hello world for an iPad. They laugh at us when we try to reinvent MVC on top of Seaside (although MVC is closesly related to Smalltalk). Because they are back home and watch Netflix while we debug our homegrown base libraries that are, of course, much better than theirs because they are written in Smalltalk.

I am not arguing that maintaining Smalltalk code is far superior to most technolgies out there. But depending on the needs of our projects we have to learn and use those crappy technologies to accomplish what they offer. Because, sometimes (especially if you have to pay bills), an existing library with flaws is better than none.

So if I have to use Javascript or C# or Dart or Swift to do the frontend part of my system, is there still much benefit in using these together with Smalltalk? Or is there - at least from a manager’s point of view - not a reasonable amount of sense in choosing the frontend technology also for the logic and compensate the loss in productivity with a gain in avoided complexity?

Your answer delivers a lot of food for thought, but I don’t buy all of it. And I don’t expect you to buy all of mine ;-)

Joachim

...

Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages? No, because most of them are crap in every language I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid. I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps. However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job. That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk. It was writing Java.

The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code". I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers. I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’. An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.

If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work". Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work". They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often. Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.

Why don’t their competitors do it? Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t. Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market. Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.

Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters. When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.

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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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>](%22mailto:pharo-users-bounces@lists.pharo.org%22) on behalf of David Mason [<dmason@ryerson.ca>](%22mailto:dmason@ryerson.ca%22) Reply-To: Any question about pharo is welcome [<pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>](%22mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org%22) Date: Tuesday, October 24, 2017 at 11:52 AM To: Any question about pharo is welcome [<pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>](%22mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org%22) 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](%22http:/pharojs.org%22)

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](%22mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de%22) <[jtuchel@objektfabrik.de](%22mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de%22)> 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](%22mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de%22) Fliederweg 1 [http://www.objektfabrik.de](%22http:/www.objektfabrik.de%22) D-71640 Ludwigsburg [http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com](%22http:/joachimtuchel.wordpress.com%22) Telefon: [+49 7141 56 10 86 0](%22tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%200%22) Fax: [+49 7141 56 10 86 1](%22tel:%2B49%207141%2056%2010%2086%201%22)

—

————————————————————————

Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel [mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de](%22mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de%22)

Fliederweg 1 [http://www.objektfabrik.de](%22http:/www.objektfabrik.de%22)

D-71640 Ludwigsburg [http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com](%22http:/joachimtuchel.wordpress.com%22)

Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1

There’s a million ways of accomplishing such things, but you need to pick the appropriate way to do it, given restrictions in Pharo and limitations in what’s it’s calling. You can utilize Kafka or Kerberos authentication via Synapse, for instance, you can access virtually any authentication mechanism via WSO2 IS (itself built on Synapse). Another way of accessing the same things (plus numerous others) is via Vert.x, also directly supported from the Pharo catalog. I’ve used that methodology as well, though I had to overcome Vert.x’s own limitations by mapping it to the more capable Apache River (formerly JINI). You can access Hadoop / Cassandra / MongoDB via the same methods Kafka, Storm and Spark do, without the problems introduced by the JVM. MongoDB and Cassandra have libraries already available in Pharo, and they work better than those available elsewhere. There are even ways to directly access the Open Telephony API in ERLAN. Sometimes you need to be creative, and every time you need to understand the strengths and limitations of both what you’re using, and what you’re accessing. Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: henry Sent: Friday, October 27, 2017 5:03 PM To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Elastic search JSON integration would be another good one. I heard there was a Kafka integration, is that true? Where could I find that, I used to use Kafka. Kafka is a great event channel for input to BigData. Using Kafka, it is well in crafting a Lamda Architecture. Imagine Pharo where Storm resides. - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:51, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote:  How about Kerberos? Can we get a team to look closely at bringing integration for enterprise users? That would be helpful, or can you just put it behind a Kerberos wrapper? If that would work, collecting a demo, that could unlock more corporate wallets , for investment. - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:41, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote: How is there no steering committee to accumulate wrapping 3rd party libraries in Alien to gain benefits of code in other languages? Do not assume that code is not extremely well written in that particular language for that particular task and that particular deployment mechanism. Can Pharo be called as a shared library from Java JNA? - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 15:47, Andrew Glynn <aglynn42@gmail.com> wrote: I’m not claiming I don’t or haven’t been affected, only that I no long allow myself to be.  Does that cause issues?  Of course.  But I’d rather deal with those than do things I don’t enjoy.  However I only got to that point after 26 years in the industry, so I don’t expect that everyone will feel that way.   Cheers Andrew   Sent from Mail for Windows 10   From: jtuchel@objektfabrik.de Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 8:14 AM To: pharo-users@lists.pharo.org Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument   Andrew, Am 26.10.17 um 00:46 schrieb Andrew Glynn: There’s other questions that are relevant to me: I am glad you opened your words with this sentence. Other peoples’ mileages may vary a lot.

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.   Some people can’t. I can’t. I am making my living with a web based application. And I like it.   Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s too small to read anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.>

So you are in the lucky position that neither mobile nor web nor integration matters to you or you have enough resources to do all that stuff yourself. I am envyous. I need to build web pages and people ask me whether we can ship an iPhone App. I do customer-facing stuff and sex sells much more than we like to think. Your comments on the crappiness of libs in other languages is a great fit for Smalltalk. Not invented here, therefor rubbish. We came a long way with this way of thinking. But these rubbish makers dance circles around us while we try to do our first hello world for an iPad. They laugh at us when we try to reinvent MVC on top of Seaside (although MVC is closesly related to Smalltalk). Because they are back home and watch Netflix while we debug our homegrown base libraries that are, of course, much better than theirs because they are written in Smalltalk. I am not arguing that maintaining Smalltalk code is far superior to most technolgies out there. But depending on the needs of our projects we have to learn and use those crappy technologies to accomplish what they offer. Because, sometimes (especially if you have to pay bills), an existing library with flaws is better than none. So if I have to use Javascript or C# or Dart or Swift to do the frontend part of my system, is there still much benefit in using these together with Smalltalk? Or is there - at least from a manager’s point of view - not a reasonable amount of sense in choosing the frontend technology also for the logic and compensate the loss in productivity with a gain in avoided complexity? Your answer delivers a lot of food for thought, but I don’t buy all of it. And I don’t expect you to buy all of mine ;-) Joachim     Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages?  No, because most of them are crap in every language I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.   The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code".  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.   If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work".  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work".  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.    Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.    Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.    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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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     — ———————————————————————— 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    

Last point. Blocks are already better lambdas than lambdas in Java. Have a look at this code from rxJava, which includes the Java 8 lambda version and a Java 7 version using an anonymous inner class: Java 8 code package rxjava.examples; import io.reactivex.*; public class HelloWorld { public static void main(String[] args) { Flowable.just("Hello world").subscribe(System.out::println); } } Java 7 code import io.reactivex.functions.Consumer; Flowable.just("Hello world") .subscribe(new Consumer<String>() { @Override public void accept(String s) { System.out.println(s); } }); Are they equivalent? How would you know? In fact, they aren’t, worse, the results of the difference depend on the target, whether it’s Java SE (including Spring based apps) or JavaEE. The Java 8 version doesn’t create an anonymous inner class but a generically named class with generically named methods. As a result, it will be most often faster. However it’s less safe, because particularly in clustered environments, and unpredictably, it can create conflicts due to the same generic names being used by two different JVM’s. The Java 7 version will be as fast, in JavaEE, and safer. In Java SE they’re close to equivalently safe, but the Java 7 version will be significantly slower in most cases. RxJava itself, as well, is unnecessary in Pharo, since the Announcer already implements the same pattern, and does so in a more efficient and more consistent way. Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: henry Sent: Friday, October 27, 2017 5:03 PM To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Elastic search JSON integration would be another good one. I heard there was a Kafka integration, is that true? Where could I find that, I used to use Kafka. Kafka is a great event channel for input to BigData. Using Kafka, it is well in crafting a Lamda Architecture. Imagine Pharo where Storm resides. - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:51, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote:  How about Kerberos? Can we get a team to look closely at bringing integration for enterprise users? That would be helpful, or can you just put it behind a Kerberos wrapper? If that would work, collecting a demo, that could unlock more corporate wallets , for investment. - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:41, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote: How is there no steering committee to accumulate wrapping 3rd party libraries in Alien to gain benefits of code in other languages? Do not assume that code is not extremely well written in that particular language for that particular task and that particular deployment mechanism. Can Pharo be called as a shared library from Java JNA? - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 15:47, Andrew Glynn <aglynn42@gmail.com> wrote: I’m not claiming I don’t or haven’t been affected, only that I no long allow myself to be.  Does that cause issues?  Of course.  But I’d rather deal with those than do things I don’t enjoy.  However I only got to that point after 26 years in the industry, so I don’t expect that everyone will feel that way.   Cheers Andrew   Sent from Mail for Windows 10   From: jtuchel@objektfabrik.de Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 8:14 AM To: pharo-users@lists.pharo.org Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument   Andrew, Am 26.10.17 um 00:46 schrieb Andrew Glynn: There’s other questions that are relevant to me: I am glad you opened your words with this sentence. Other peoples’ mileages may vary a lot.

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.   Some people can’t. I can’t. I am making my living with a web based application. And I like it.   Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s too small to read anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.>

So you are in the lucky position that neither mobile nor web nor integration matters to you or you have enough resources to do all that stuff yourself. I am envyous. I need to build web pages and people ask me whether we can ship an iPhone App. I do customer-facing stuff and sex sells much more than we like to think. Your comments on the crappiness of libs in other languages is a great fit for Smalltalk. Not invented here, therefor rubbish. We came a long way with this way of thinking. But these rubbish makers dance circles around us while we try to do our first hello world for an iPad. They laugh at us when we try to reinvent MVC on top of Seaside (although MVC is closesly related to Smalltalk). Because they are back home and watch Netflix while we debug our homegrown base libraries that are, of course, much better than theirs because they are written in Smalltalk. I am not arguing that maintaining Smalltalk code is far superior to most technolgies out there. But depending on the needs of our projects we have to learn and use those crappy technologies to accomplish what they offer. Because, sometimes (especially if you have to pay bills), an existing library with flaws is better than none. So if I have to use Javascript or C# or Dart or Swift to do the frontend part of my system, is there still much benefit in using these together with Smalltalk? Or is there - at least from a manager’s point of view - not a reasonable amount of sense in choosing the frontend technology also for the logic and compensate the loss in productivity with a gain in avoided complexity? Your answer delivers a lot of food for thought, but I don’t buy all of it. And I don’t expect you to buy all of mine ;-) Joachim     Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages?  No, because most of them are crap in every language I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.   The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code".  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.   If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work".  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work".  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.    Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.    Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.    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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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     — ———————————————————————— 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    

Hadoop, if one wanted to utilize it in a similar way to Spark, Storm, Kafka, HDB, or the PostgreSQL overlay (the latter can be done now using either Garage + GLORP, or slightly faster using the newer GLORP PostgreSQL integration), might be best implemented as a SQL driver. Using GLORP with Garage via the other methods mentioned would give a similar ability to avoid map/reduce. Map/reduce, though, is 2/3’ds of the advantage of Hadoop, so avoiding it seems counterproductive if writing new code (simply using the PostgreSQL requires no new code). Granted, thinking how to do numerous things that have well known SQL solutions is not necessarily easy via map/reduce, which somewhat explains the proliferation of ways of avoiding it. On the other hand, not using it somewhat cripples the effectiveness of Hadoop, which is exacerbated by the concurrency limitations of using a JVM language, whether Java, Scala, or anything else that compiles to JVM bytecode. Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: henry Sent: Friday, October 27, 2017 5:03 PM To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Elastic search JSON integration would be another good one. I heard there was a Kafka integration, is that true? Where could I find that, I used to use Kafka. Kafka is a great event channel for input to BigData. Using Kafka, it is well in crafting a Lamda Architecture. Imagine Pharo where Storm resides. - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:51, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote:  How about Kerberos? Can we get a team to look closely at bringing integration for enterprise users? That would be helpful, or can you just put it behind a Kerberos wrapper? If that would work, collecting a demo, that could unlock more corporate wallets , for investment. - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:41, henry <henry@callistohouse.club> wrote: How is there no steering committee to accumulate wrapping 3rd party libraries in Alien to gain benefits of code in other languages? Do not assume that code is not extremely well written in that particular language for that particular task and that particular deployment mechanism. Can Pharo be called as a shared library from Java JNA? - HH On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 15:47, Andrew Glynn <aglynn42@gmail.com> wrote: I’m not claiming I don’t or haven’t been affected, only that I no long allow myself to be.  Does that cause issues?  Of course.  But I’d rather deal with those than do things I don’t enjoy.  However I only got to that point after 26 years in the industry, so I don’t expect that everyone will feel that way.   Cheers Andrew   Sent from Mail for Windows 10   From: jtuchel@objektfabrik.de Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 8:14 AM To: pharo-users@lists.pharo.org Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument   Andrew, Am 26.10.17 um 00:46 schrieb Andrew Glynn: There’s other questions that are relevant to me: I am glad you opened your words with this sentence. Other peoples’ mileages may vary a lot.

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.   Some people can’t. I can’t. I am making my living with a web based application. And I like it.   Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s too small to read anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.>

So you are in the lucky position that neither mobile nor web nor integration matters to you or you have enough resources to do all that stuff yourself. I am envyous. I need to build web pages and people ask me whether we can ship an iPhone App. I do customer-facing stuff and sex sells much more than we like to think. Your comments on the crappiness of libs in other languages is a great fit for Smalltalk. Not invented here, therefor rubbish. We came a long way with this way of thinking. But these rubbish makers dance circles around us while we try to do our first hello world for an iPad. They laugh at us when we try to reinvent MVC on top of Seaside (although MVC is closesly related to Smalltalk). Because they are back home and watch Netflix while we debug our homegrown base libraries that are, of course, much better than theirs because they are written in Smalltalk. I am not arguing that maintaining Smalltalk code is far superior to most technolgies out there. But depending on the needs of our projects we have to learn and use those crappy technologies to accomplish what they offer. Because, sometimes (especially if you have to pay bills), an existing library with flaws is better than none. So if I have to use Javascript or C# or Dart or Swift to do the frontend part of my system, is there still much benefit in using these together with Smalltalk? Or is there - at least from a manager’s point of view - not a reasonable amount of sense in choosing the frontend technology also for the logic and compensate the loss in productivity with a gain in avoided complexity? Your answer delivers a lot of food for thought, but I don’t buy all of it. And I don’t expect you to buy all of mine ;-) Joachim     Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages?  No, because most of them are crap in every language I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.   The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code".  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.   If you’re 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 aren’t 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 "shit has to work".  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when "shit has to work".  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.    Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.    Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.    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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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     — ———————————————————————— 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    

One point: ‘not invented here’, though related to my notion of ‘building on rather than building with’, is not exactly the same. There are instances where it’s valid, unfortunately that helps to give the impression that invalid but related ideas are also valid. Cisco for instance is an extreme of ‘not invented here’. In terms of designing an ASR-9010, that’s valid, in terms of building their own website, not so much. As a metaphor, consider the difference between hand built, perhaps small relative volume, but still mass produced cars, such as Jaguar pre-Ford’s buyout, and truly small volume niche cars, such as Lamborghini’s. Jaguars simply gained a rep for being unreliable and very difficult to work on, and the company nearly went out of business. Lamborghini on the other hand has a multi-year waiting list to buy their cars, despite the enormous cost, and that you have to pay that cost just to get on the waiting list. Progressing to more complex and more crucial systems, would you want the Defense Automation System in the F-35 written in JavaScript? To make the reasoning more obvious - that system automatically uses every available weapon on the plane to defend itself without pilot involvement, and can even take over control in order to perform evasive actions beyond the capabilities of most human pilots. In turn, the above implies that on the sub-millisecond level, it has to be able to distinguish between enemy and friendly objects, via nothing but 15 x 3-part sensors. If it seems a little dicey in any system, how would you want to implement it in JavaScript, or GO, or any number of other recent languages? And what libraries would you trust in terms of implementing it in any language? Cheers Andrew Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: jtuchel@objektfabrik.de Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 8:14 AM To: pharo-users@lists.pharo.org Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument Andrew, Am 26.10.17 um 00:46 schrieb Andrew Glynn: There’s other questions that are relevant to me: I am glad you opened your words with this sentence. Other peoples' mileages may vary a lot.

Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in any way I can avoid it.

Some people can't. I can't. I am making my living with a web based application. And I like it.  

Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s too small to read anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.>

So you are in the lucky position that neither mobile nor web nor integration matters to you or you have enough resources to do all that stuff yourself. I am envyous. I need to build web pages and people ask me whether we can ship an iPhone App. I do customer-facing stuff and sex sells much more than we like to think. Your comments on the crappiness of libs in other languages is a great fit for Smalltalk. Not invented here, therefor rubbish. We came a long way with this way of thinking. But these rubbish makers dance circles around us while we try to do our first hello world for an iPad. They laugh at us when we try to reinvent MVC on top of Seaside (although MVC is closesly related to Smalltalk). Because they are back home and watch Netflix while we debug our homegrown base libraries that are, of course, much better than theirs because they are written in Smalltalk. I am not arguing that maintaining Smalltalk code is far superior to most technolgies out there. But depending on the needs of our projects we have to learn and use those crappy technologies to accomplish what they offer. Because, sometimes (especially if you have to pay bills), an existing library with flaws is better than none. So if I have to use Javascript or C# or Dart or Swift to do the frontend part of my system, is there still much benefit in using these together with Smalltalk? Or is there - at least from a manager's point of view - not a reasonable amount of sense in choosing the frontend technology also for the logic and compensate the loss in productivity with a gain in avoided complexity? Your answer delivers a lot of food for thought, but I don't buy all of it. And I don't expect you to buy all of mine ;-) Joachim     Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages?  No, because most of them are crap in every language I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve written tons of web apps, because I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m 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 it’s 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 I’d be willing to move back there for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk developers”, but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was writing Java.   The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, because “people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code”.  I don’t agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 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 ‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies plenty about JS developers on the whole.   If you’re 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 aren’t 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 “shit has to work”.  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they all use it only when “shit has to work”.  They know it’s 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 doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors don’t.    Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the Electron site don’t work.    Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 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 ‘shit has to work’.    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 competitors’ 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 that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java and JavaScript, as a result it can’t 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 Joachim’s 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 can’t (and if they can’t, 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t 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 can’t 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 doesn’t, 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   -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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

Dear Ben, Jimmie, Stephane, Tim, Dimitris, Marten, Davorin, Stephan, Sebastian and James, thank you for your feedback! Your excellent replies will sure help me with my "Smalltalk Argument". Obviously the language cannot be employed to efficiently implement solutions for problems in all domains, but it cannot simply be ruled out just because it is not so visible as other languages clamoring for the spotlight, as Jimmie pointed out. So far I got good results that can talk for themselves thanks to Pharo/Smalltalk. So the problem here, I believe, is really Smalltalk not being the "cool kid in town", which leads to a misperception of the language by the non-versed. This can be certainly be blamed to the lack of a good business oriented OSS Smalltalk years ago, as Ben guessed, but certainly there are other factors, which are not the scope of this discussion. The fact that a good OO-software developer can learn and start to get productive in Smalltalk in a relatively short amount of time, as pointed out by several of you, will make a good argument against the concerns of my colleagues here, which are mainly non-software developers. And surely the willingness to learn a new language is a sign to be looked at in a candidate, as pointed by you too. The second most loved language by 67% of developers surveyed cannot simply be ruled out because of unfounded concerns. (Thanks again for the information, Jimmie). I think there is really a great potential here, and surely there is a greater pool of developer candidates to "draw from" than one can initially imagine/see. Cheers, Paulo On 10/20/2017 12:17 AM, Ben Coman wrote:

On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 3:04 PM, Paulo R. Dellani <dellani@pobox.com <mailto:dellani@pobox.com>> wrote:

Dear all,

after using Smalltalk for several years I developed a passion for the language (how not to?), and Pharo is just so great to develop with. So thank you guys for keeping this wonderful project running.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to always point out why Smalltalk should be employed as "main development language" in a team or for a project. In the last discussion of this sort I was confronted with the question "where are we going to get new smalltalk developers if our startup grows or if you go?". Well, I had no good answer to that. What would have you answered?

Cheers,

Paulo

When Smalltalk comes up on reddit, news.ycombinator, etc, I often see comments "Used Smalltalk 10 years ago, loved it, but not in my day job for years ..." The guess the lack of a good business oriented OSS Smalltalk years ago may be to blame. Only supposition, but with the long history of Smalltalker, the pool to draw from may be greater than first apparent. The main problem may be that these people are not searching for Smalltalk jobs due to the perceived availability of jobs.

There would obviously be some lag, but for longer term planning, talk to your local education providers about introducing Smalltalk as the "best" environment for teaching OO, and then take the talented students from there.  Consider contacting the academic partners here... http://consortium.pharo.org/

Another approach depending on the project structure might be to "just" prototype in Smalltalk (because its highly productive to explore a domain with its built in data persistence) and per Fred Brooks plan to throw it away to cleanly implement in a mainstream language once you "know" what needs to be done.   I remember seeing one case reported here that the prototype worked so well that the client didn't bother with the second step.

cheers -ben

I also do not believe my eyes: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted On 10/20/2017 10:20 AM, Marten Feldtmann wrote:

I do not want to spoil the party (perhaps I've done this already) - but has anyone done a serious inspection of this number: 67%.

They have interviewed 64000 persons and 67% of the people should "love" Smalltalk? Come on, that seems to be not possible. Perhaps 67% of the user already using Smalltalk "love" that.

By the way - the most loved platform is Linux (69%) ...

Marten

Am 20.10.2017 um 09:19 schrieb Paulo R. Dellani:

...

The second most loved language by 67% of developers surveyed cannot simply be ruled out because of unfounded concerns. (Thanks again for the

2017-10-20 10:20 GMT+02:00 Marten Feldtmann <itlists@schrievkrom.de>:

I do not want to spoil the party (perhaps I've done this already) - but has anyone done a serious inspection of this number: 67%.

They have interviewed 64000 persons and 67% of the people should "love" Smalltalk? Come on, that seems to be not possible. Perhaps 67% of the user already using Smalltalk "love" that.

As far as I understand it, the question was different. They asked, if you use Smalltalk, would you like to use it the next year too (or something like that). Then the number makes more sense. -- Pavel

By the way - the most loved platform is Linux (69%) ...

Marten

Am 20.10.2017 um 09:19 schrieb Paulo R. Dellani:

...

The second most loved language by 67% of developers surveyed cannot

simply

...

be ruled out because of unfounded concerns. (Thanks again for the

-- Marten Feldtmann

To quote from The Wisdom of the Crowd <https://hackernoon.com/the-wisdom-of-the-crowd-c7aff954bd5f> : The crowd is indeed wise. This wisdom shows up in the latest StackOverflow survey <https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-most-loved-dreaded...> , as well. Under “Most Loved Languages,” Smalltalk shows up in clear second place (after Rust and before TypeScript, Swift, Go, Python, Elixir, and C#). This shows that people who’ve used Smalltalk love the language and are loyal to it. It also shows, by inference, that the programming community is not aware of how good Smalltalk is. Most in the community wallow in ignorance over it. /If they were to try Smalltalk programming, the language would very likely become popular./ itlists@schrievkrom.de wrote

I do not want to spoil the party (perhaps I've done this already) - but has anyone done a serious inspection of this number: 67%.

They have interviewed 64000 persons and 67% of the people should "love" Smalltalk? Come on, that seems to be not possible. Perhaps 67% of the user already using Smalltalk "love" that.

By the way - the most loved platform is Linux (69%) ...

Marten

Am 20.10.2017 um 09:19 schrieb Paulo R. Dellani:

...

The second most loved language by 67% of developers surveyed cannot simply be ruled out because of unfounded concerns. (Thanks again for the

-- Marten Feldtmann

-- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html