Exploring Pier

Hello,

I am interested in learning to use Pier. I browsed the mailing list to
learn about current status and documentation. It seems to be pretty
quiet on the mailing lists.

There seems to be some activity on Smalltalkhub on Pier3.

I am interested to see how well supported Pier is (is going to be).

And if Pier is still active in the community. Is there any current
documentation and where?

Thanks for any help and opinions regarding Pier and its current and
future situation.

Jimmie

Hi,

Jimmie Houchin <[hidden email]> writes:

> I am interested in learning to use Pier. I browsed the mailing list to
> learn about current status and documentation. It seems to be pretty
> quiet on the mailing lists.
>
> There seems to be some activity on Smalltalkhub on Pier3.


Pillar, the document model and parser of Pier is alive. I need help but
the project is definitely not dead as we use it for all books we are
writing.

The rest of Pier, mainly the web interface, looks rather dead for me as
well.

Why are you interested in Pier? We might help you find other projects
that could suit your needs.

--
Damien Cassou
http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without
losing enthusiasm." --Winston Churchill

On 21-09-15 23:44, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
We run a few pier sites, one of which uses bootstrap. The configuration
of pier needs updating to no longer track the (incompatible) changes in
pillar. Apart from that it is very stable. Not all of the add-ons are up
to date. We run the sites so, that they monitor a package cache
directory and load newer versions of the site automatically, so we can
just do a git push to update.

Stephan

I know there are options to Pier. To a certain extent part of the
purpose of my email was to explore whether or not Pier is a viable
option and if it has community support that I am not easily seeing.

I want to stick with reasonably well supported options.

I thought the cms and blog parts of Pier looked interesting. This is all
personal and not for business or public.

I definitely want to learn Pillar as it is required if at some point I
want to contribute to any of the documentation. And it looks like a
pretty powerful tool.

I do not have any clearly defined goals which make Pier a requirement.
The blog and cms like features are possibly reasonably implementable in
the more currently supported options. And those are simply things I am
exploring not requiring.

It seems that Doru possibly uses it on the
http://www.humane-assessment.com/blog site.

Thanks.

Jimmie

On 09/22/2015 02:38 AM, Damien Cassou wrote:

Jimmie Houchin <[hidden email]> writes:

> I definitely want to learn Pillar as it is required if at some point I
> want to contribute to any of the documentation. And it looks like a
> pretty powerful tool.


indeed


> I do not have any clearly defined goals which make Pier a requirement.
> The blog and cms like features are possibly reasonably implementable
> in the more currently supported options. And those are simply things I
> am exploring not requiring.


you might want to use Pillar directly to generate a static website and
add some dynamic plugins (such as Disqus for the comments). Ecstatic
(https://github.com/guillep/ecstatic) goes in that direction.

--
Damien Cassou
http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without
losing enthusiasm." --Winston Churchill

On 09/23/2015 02:59 AM, Damien Cassou wrote:
Thanks for the information. I briefly had that thought about static
generation yesterday. But did not have any thoughts for comments.

I give that a look.

Thanks.

Jimmie

Hi Jimmie,

Some or your searches/needs seem similar to mine. So I will share some
of the stuff I'm using or considering, which is not Pharo/Smalltalk
related and how I plan to connect it with Pharo.

On markup language and documentation I'm using pandoc[1], which covers a
wide variety of formats (including Html and LaTeX, like Pillar) and
works on Windows, Gnu/Linux and Mac with a pretty portable installation.
I use Zotero[2] integration vía BibTeX and Citezen[3] using
Grafoscopio[4], a custom made Pharo interactive documentation system I'm
building to learn smalltalk. On the website generation, I was a
user/promoter of web2py[5] for several year, but recently I'm migrating
towards static site genetators like Nikola[6] and Grav[7] because I
don't need any much else for my web presence.

[1] http://pandoc.org/
[2] https://www.zotero.org/
[3]
http://vst.ensm-douai.fr/ESUG2009Media/uploads/1/citezen-EsugAwards2009.pdf
[4] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~Offray/Grafoscopio
[5] http://web2py.com/
[6] https://getnikola.com/
[7] http://getgrav.org/

My idea is to build an interface from Grafoscopio to this non-pharo
technologies like static web site generators, so you can use the
interactivity of Pharo/Smalltalk, without having to reinvent the wheel
all the time (at least for wheels yo don't care about). I'm trying to
find the knowledge/time to put this ideas into practice. Maybe you can
consider some of these in your initial overview of the problem and the
solutions.

Cheers,

Offray

On 22/09/15 11:30, Jimmie Houchin wrote:

Hello Offray,

My apologies for the delay in reply. I have been on holiday.

Thanks for the suggestions. I am pretty much wanting to stick with Pharo
solutions. I want to use and contribute to the Pharo ecosystem.

I believe the more we use our own tools and contribute toward the
ecosystem the better our tools and the ecosystem will be. In Pharo I can
possibly offer an occasional bug fix, contribute to documentation or tests.

And yes, the other solutions do offer that as well as they are open
source. But the bar is much higher. I now have to understand their
ecosystems, languages, and development cultures of a variety of tools.

In Pharo I have Pharo/Smalltalk. Even a simple user can often contribute
in simple ways. Even as a simple user of a Pharo tool. I can submit
issues, fix simple issues, improve method or class comments, etc. As I
learn the Pharo tools and ecosystem I continually improve my ability to
take care of myself and also contribute to the community. I think Pharo
is the most user empowering environment I have found. Sure I can find
lots and lots of other quality tools in other languages. But each is
their own island. And depending on how broadly I spread the net.
Different languages, different cultures, different licenses, all
independent of each other.

I much prefer the Pharo ecosystem and culture. It is home.
I know others who like the other tools, and multiplicity of choice. And
they feel comfortable there.

Choice is nice. Pharo is mine.

Thanks again for suggestions and for a view on how others approach
problems and their solutions. That is always available as inspiration
even within Pharo. I take a look at your stuff.

Jimmie


On 09/28/2015 09:03 AM, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote:

:)

Hi Jimmie,



On 05/10/15 09:16, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
> Hello Offray,
>
> My apologies for the delay in reply. I have been on holiday.
>

No problem. I'm not as proactive as I would like on this community. I'm
trying to gain time/knowledge to contribute more, but there are pending
answers from me on interesting topics, so thanks for taking your time to
answer. I have grouped your answer in two parts: Pharo related and other
tools related. More comments below.

> Thanks for the suggestions. I am pretty much wanting to stick with
> Pharo solutions. I want to use and contribute to the Pharo ecosystem.
>
> I believe the more we use our own tools and contribute toward the
> ecosystem the better our tools and the ecosystem will be. In Pharo I
> can possibly offer an occasional bug fix, contribute to documentation
> or tests.
>
[...]
> In Pharo I have Pharo/Smalltalk. Even a simple user can often
> contribute in simple ways. Even as a simple user of a Pharo tool. I
> can submit issues, fix simple issues, improve method or class
> comments, etc. As I learn the Pharo tools and ecosystem I continually
> improve my ability to take care of myself and also contribute to the
> community. I think Pharo is the most user empowering environment I
> have found.

I agree with you. I share your vision of Smalltalk as the most
empowering environment I have used. First time we meet (vía EToys,
Scratch, BotsInc) I felt in love, but weren't ready for each other and
took almost 10 years and Pharo to bring me back (kind of a bittersweet
love story). I'm a simple user, but in this last year after returning
back I have made stuff I just thought/dream about in other environments.
Still a lot of things to learn and rookie code and practice, but I'm
improving faster that in any other environment, despite of having not as
much time to practice as I would like. Even prototyping is faster... a
lot faster.

I want to help Pharo too, by making it talk better with other/external
ways of thinking/practicing computing. For example, after my talk with
Serge about IPtyhon/Jupyter and Grafoscopio (my learning project) it was
clearer to my that interactive documentation and data visualization was
being bridged with objects via scripting (thanks to embedded playground
in the document tree). So you can start thinking in a more "emergent
way": documents and scripts instead of a hierarchy of objects and
messages, and then go from your scripts in documents to more objectual
forms as you clear your mind about the problem. This practice/thinking
was far away ten years ago for grown ups in Etoys, BotsInc, as also
happened with documentation (they happen elsewhere and not inside the
image).


> And yes, the other solutions do offer that as well as they are open
> source. But the bar is much higher. I now have to understand their
> ecosystems, languages, and development cultures of a variety of tools.
>
[...]
> Sure I can find lots and lots of other quality tools in other
> languages. But each is their own island. And depending on how broadly
> I spread the net. Different languages, different cultures, different
> licenses, all independent of each other.
>
[...]
> I much prefer the Pharo ecosystem and culture. It is home.
> I know others who like the other tools, and multiplicity of choice.
> And they feel comfortable there.
>

I prefer Pharo too. I have felt the "red pill" effect talked several
times in the Pharo/Smalltalk culture. You just need to enter the matrix
sometimes to awake others :-), which means that you share their reality
for a while to teach them you can bend the rules or have super powers
after taking the red pill. But you need to enter the matrix to offer
them the red pill. My way to enter the matrix and made that offer is via
interactive documentation, scripting and data visualization, because
this juncture appeals a lot of people beyond programmers (like myself).

The way I want to use to evade the complexities of other technologies,
idiosyncrasies and cultures is try to talk only with the backend
(storage formats/schemas) and frontend (these days mostly html). But I
want to use what I already have and know to make that bridge. Put
Pharo/Smalltalk in the existing practices and technologies in a
symbiotic approach (or something like the assimilation of of star trek's
cyborgs, until "resistance is futile", to follow with SciFi images :-)
).  I have blogged recently about a specific case for this approach here:

http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/2015-10-06-grav-nikola-both

> Choice is nice. Pharo is mine.
>

:-)+3 to follow Sthepharo and Doru.

> Thanks again for suggestions and for a view on how others approach
> problems and their solutions. That is always available as inspiration
> even within Pharo. I take a look at your stuff.
>

Nice to help.

Cheers,

Offray

Hola Offray,

Thanks for the positive reply. I was hoping you wouldn't take anything I
wrote negatively.

On 10/13/2015 12:20 PM, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote:
Correct.

I understand your journey. I too have been a part of this community and
Squeak for a long time. However, between what capabilities Squeak/Pharo
had and my skill set and project requirements, I have at times had to
look elsewhere. Some things require the ability to use external
libraries. This sometimes requires skills which I don't have or the
current state of FFI/NB isn't friendly for people like me.

But I think over time Pharo is becoming more capable and hopefully at
some point its interoperability will improve as well.

If you have the skills or can live with the few interoperability issues.
I haven't found anything that I feel that is as empowering as Pharo.

For me my project requirements have changed and I am no longer requiring
the use of a proprietary C++/C library.

I am not sure I understand what you are trying to do here with Jupyter
and Grafoscopio. I think Jupyter is exceptionally nice if you are doing
Python. I have used it both with Python and Julia. But I don't see why
or for what I would use it for if I have a much superior, IMO, live
environment in Pharo.

Jupyter is a nice option to command line or repl Python. But Pharo
(Smalltalk's) image environment is so much more than anything offered
easily anywhere else.

I understand your journey here. I am also on a similar journey. I want
at some point to have a web presence and some ability to do some
interesting things in the cloud. But I also want more control and am not
interested in many of the mass technologies or services. I am still very
much exploring and learning. I am not sure of the direction I will go
and what role Pharo will play.

>> Choice is nice. Pharo is mine.
>>
>
> :-)+3 to follow Stepharo and Doru.

I love Pharo and it is my first choice. But it will still have to earn
its place in my technology stack.

So it is nice to have the option of Pharo. And it is still nice to have
other options should they become desired or required depending on what
one is trying to do.

The hard thing to do sometimes is to actually fully express what you are
wanting to do and trying to accomplish. Until that is somewhat done. It
is really hard to know what is the best way to go. And that is kind of
where I am at the moment. But Pharo is good at helping you to try stuff
out and explore your problem domain and hopefully make a better informed
decision even if Pharo is or is not in that final decision.

Thanks.

Jimmie