Morphic

  On 9/20/2010 11:33 AM, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
I too agree. It is very nice to have a clean, clear vision statement in
which the community can put its resources behind to accomplish. We can
accomplish more together than each alone. The whole is greater than the
sum of its parts. Without a unifying vision, you have the sum of its
parts. With a vision, you have common goal, a unifying purpose. You have
something that can inspire. Something that can guide, in where to draw
lines, what to add, what to cut, what belongs in, what belongs out.

You can do most anything in either Squeak or Pharo that you can do in
the other. But ultimately I believe that Pharo is moving in a direction
which empowers more people. Many of the Squeak users can use Squeak for
most anything they need or want, primarily because they are very
skilled/expert in both Smalltalk/Squeak and also interfacing outside
systems via FFI, Alien, plugins, etc. But for those of us who are not so
able, who do not have the training or knowledge, Pharo's vision and
implementation therefore will IMHO be more enabling and empowering,
especially to the less than expert, the little guy. And when Pharo
achieves the smaller cleaner core, it will also be more
enabling/empowering to the expert.

Pharo is explicitly more business friendly in its vision, goals,
leadership and community.

I am a huge advocate of business in open source. I think as business
prospers within the Squeak/Pharo communities that the community improves
as does the artifact itself. It is my opinion that Pharo is explicitly
more open towards this synergy with business. Squeak is not necessarily
against such, but is more of the perspective of we happen to be walking
together in the same direction.

Pharo is explicitly pro-business.
Squeak will not prohibit, but not really support. And yes I know there
are businesses based upon Squeak, but primarily owned and operated by
experts.

For me my initial push into Pharo came simply from
wanting/requiring/desiring code completion in workspaces and the
browsers. Squeak was and is broken on OCompletion. And I did not see any
other alternatives. I read all the messages, tried many things. No
success. Even today the issue pops up again on the list. 5 months after
the last series of messages which had no clear answer on how to get it
working in Squeak. Pharo it just worked out of the box. And thank you
Levente for showing how to get it working in Squeak.

That might be a little thing, but it is an important thing and it
highlights some of the differences and goals of the two projects and
communities.

I am not against Squeak. I would that we were all one big happy family
putting all our energies into something that works for all. But that is
not the case and one has to choose where to put ones energies and time.
Hopefully most efforts will be usable by both. But as each diverge that
may be increasingly difficult.

I presently do not see a Pro-business or even particularly
business-friendly vision from Squeak.

Just my perspective and opinions.

Thanks.

Jimmie

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Hopefully Polymorph can help.
Hillaire. Sure there are ongoing changes, but hopefully insulated from the
"end user".

Not by any means perfect, but a start at having a stable interface between
look-and-feel and people's expression of  user interfaces...

My vision, as such, for Polymorph is to evolve to a "competent" interface
that can be relied upon.
Both the interface and lower level details are in flux, but there's much
that can be relied on.

The experiment is to flesh-out the needs and standardise (with flexibility).

Regards, Gary

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stéphane Ducasse" <[hidden email]>
To: <[hidden email]>; <[hidden email]>
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 9:12 PM
Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] [squeak-dev] Morphic



On Sep 20, 2010, at 9:45 PM, Chris Muller wrote:

> Hi Hilaire, I'm not sure if you meant "thrust" or "trust" but...  :)

:)

> I still develop for Pharo, but one of my concerns has been the short
> time between releases.  It means there is not much time for a stable,
> proven Pharo foundation to form before it is abandoned already.

I would not call it abandoned. Because this is not abandoned. Now the system
is in such a state
even if we are working a lot that we must change it. I do not like to live
with duplicated code. I thought we fixed most of it.
Or a texteditor/compiler from 30 years ago, even if the age is not a problem
:).

Did you get that many changes impacting you between 1.0 and 1.1?
For example inceptive worked a lot with 1.0 and recently moved to 1.1. I do
not know what is their experience
but it seems to be good from their side and their application is really sexy
and demanding.
We do not want to have long release cycle because we get more beta phases
where effort is on stabilization
and feedback. With longer periods we would be too much alone hacking and
people waiting to try the new one.
So I think that this is nice tension. Two/Three releases per year give 3
months minimum of beta phase.
Now you can also skipped on release on two.

> Combined with the Pharo philosophy about backward compatibility, I am
> quite nervous that Magma is going to get "stuck" in some "old" (what,
> 3 months?!) version of Pharo that never had much time to gestate in
> the first place..

I think that the pace of changes will probably slow down. Now what I see
with Moose
and moose is complex (using AST and other internal parts is that it took 1
day to migrate it).
In addition, we will not change for the sake of it but there are still
really places that
should be changed. I think that magma can gain benefit of the bytecode
rewriting
library marcus will migrate on top of Opal.

In addition I would really like to have more bits so that we can nicely have
an immutability
bit. And I imagine that the write barrier would benefit greatly of it.


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Stef,

I sometimes get overwhelmed and have probably hit about every other beta or release that I intended to use.  The improvements are accumulating and very much appreciated.

Thanks!

Bill



________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Stéphane Ducasse [[hidden email]]
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 4:12 PM
To: [hidden email]; [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] [squeak-dev] Morphic

On Sep 20, 2010, at 9:45 PM, Chris Muller wrote:

> Hi Hilaire, I'm not sure if you meant "thrust" or "trust" but...  :)

:)

> I still develop for Pharo, but one of my concerns has been the short
> time between releases.  It means there is not much time for a stable,
> proven Pharo foundation to form before it is abandoned already.

I would not call it abandoned. Because this is not abandoned. Now the system is in such a state
even if we are working a lot that we must change it. I do not like to live with duplicated code. I thought we fixed most of it.
Or a texteditor/compiler from 30 years ago, even if the age is not a problem :).

Did you get that many changes impacting you between 1.0 and 1.1?
For example inceptive worked a lot with 1.0 and recently moved to 1.1. I do not know what is their experience
but it seems to be good from their side and their application is really sexy and demanding.
We do not want to have long release cycle because we get more beta phases where effort is on stabilization
and feedback. With longer periods we would be too much alone hacking and people waiting to try the new one.
So I think that this is nice tension. Two/Three releases per year give 3 months minimum of beta phase.
Now you can also skipped on release on two.

> Combined with the Pharo philosophy about backward compatibility, I am
> quite nervous that Magma is going to get "stuck" in some "old" (what,
> 3 months?!) version of Pharo that never had much time to gestate in
> the first place..

I think that the pace of changes will probably slow down. Now what I see with Moose
and moose is complex (using AST and other internal parts is that it took 1 day to migrate it).
In addition, we will not change for the sake of it but there are still really places that
should be changed. I think that magma can gain benefit of the bytecode rewriting
library marcus will migrate on top of Opal.

In addition I would really like to have more bits so that we can nicely have an immutability
bit. And I imagine that the write barrier would benefit greatly of it.


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On Mon, 20 Sep 2010, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
When was the last time you used Squeak?

> You can object it is matter of point of view, I will object it is a
> matter of ressources you can allocate to write an application. Mine  are
> limited: I start writing DrGeo under Squeak, then I continued with
> Pharo. I can really fell the difference: nice Widgets, cleaner system I
> can understand, ease to integrate changes/improvements upstream. All in
> all, I get the job done more nicely from my perspective.

So you're using Pharo because of Polymorph?

>
> In the past, project got hudge resources (ie Sophie), this project
> failed to give back to the community in a proper way. Was it because

I don't really get this, which project are you talking about?


Levente
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On Mon, 20 Sep 2010, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
Thanks, this is really helpful. The only thing I don't really get is
what do you mean by "pro-business" and "business-friendly". What makes
Pharo "pro-business"? The pre-installed tools? The familiar looking
default UI? (only for mac users)


Levente
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Jumping in here, I used Squeak just a month or two ago to look at its serial port code, and something else IIRC.  I much prefer Pharo.



________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Levente Uzonyi [[hidden email]]
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 5:30 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] [squeak-dev] Morphic

On Mon, 20 Sep 2010, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:

When was the last time you used Squeak?

> You can object it is matter of point of view, I will object it is a
> matter of ressources you can allocate to write an application. Mine  are
> limited: I start writing DrGeo under Squeak, then I continued with
> Pharo. I can really fell the difference: nice Widgets, cleaner system I
> can understand, ease to integrate changes/improvements upstream. All in
> all, I get the job done more nicely from my perspective.

So you're using Pharo because of Polymorph?

>
> In the past, project got hudge resources (ie Sophie), this project
> failed to give back to the community in a proper way. Was it because

I don't really get this, which project are you talking about?


Levente

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On Mon, 20 Sep 2010, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:

> Jumping in here, I used Squeak just a month or two ago to look at its serial port code, and something else IIRC.  I much prefer Pharo.

And why?


Levente
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There are no doubt a growing list of reasons, but the big one is usability.  Squeak's (lack of) concept of input focus is a HUGE pain; its defaults of mouse buttons are weird.  I could go on, but I prefer to use and (to the extent that I can) help to advance Pharo.



________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Levente Uzonyi [[hidden email]]
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 6:44 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] [squeak-dev] Morphic

On Mon, 20 Sep 2010, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:

> Jumping in here, I used Squeak just a month or two ago to look at its serial port code, and something else IIRC.  I much prefer Pharo.

And why?


Levente

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On 21 September 2010 02:45, Schwab,Wilhelm K <[hidden email]> wrote:
> There are no doubt a growing list of reasons, but the big one is usability.  Squeak's (lack of) concept of input focus is a HUGE pain; its defaults of mouse buttons are weird.  I could go on, but I prefer to use and (to the extent that I can) help to advance Pharo.
>

I like to use both. And i paying attention to make my projects to run
on both projects w/o problems.
Both currently are constantly improving in UI and code quality areas.
Both having own pros and cons, but its natural, since they are
separate projects.



--
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.

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On 9/20/2010 5:30 PM, Levente Uzonyi wrote:

On Mon, 20 Sep 2010, Jimmie Houchin wrote:

I presently do not see a Pro-business or even particularly business-friendly vision from Squeak.

Just my perspective and opinions.

Thanks, this is really helpful. The only thing I don't really get is what do you mean by "pro-business" and "business-friendly". What makes Pharo "pro-business"? The pre-installed tools? The familiar looking default UI? (only for mac users)

Hello Levente,

Pharo the artifact is itself not necessarily more or less pro-business than Squeak. Pharo the vision, goals, leadership and community are.

Stephane posted a message on the list back in August:
"Poll: missing libraries to support business"

I have never seen such a post on squeak-dev. Nor in my 10+- years on squeak-dev seen many posts for/about business that received much audience. Now if you post about the fun things, etoys, midi, robots, mpeg, ... you get a fair amount of response. Many/most Squeakers are very Squeak being multimedia. I am definitely pro that. But I believe if you support people making money with Squeak/Pharo that the fun stuff is also supported. It has been reasonably, historically the opinion of many that Squeak equates to multimedia, with a strong educational leaning. If you wanted something else, it could be tolerated but not well supported. The Seaside guys had to work hard to arrive at their status. As I say, these are my opinions from reading and lightly participating in the Squeak community for 10+- years.

I have had a very long love/hate relationship with Squeak. I really, really love Squeak. The hate comes in when I find something I can't do in Squeak but can easily do in Python. That frustrates the heck out of me. Python is very pro-business, very business friendly, and it has a large enough community to accomplish those goals. Squeak doesn't have the community to accomplish all that Python has. But Squeak/Smalltalk is much more stable target. Code can last so much longer, be developed much faster. So I believe the community, though smaller, can and will accomplish more and better. At least I believe I accomplish more, better, faster in Squeak/Pharo than in Python.

Most often Squeak lost me whenever I have do things outside of Squeak or Python interfacing with the OS or outside libraries. Python has superior support for databases, etc.
Currently I have a business requirement to interface with a COM dll. So at the moment Python empowers or enables me to do that and Squeak/Pharo do not.

This is all I have to do in Python. I have this in my Python app which interfaces the COM dll to interface the server to which I need to communicate.

def make_libraries(self):
    """
    Before you can use the libraries inside Python, you have to run once the makepy.py script
    (.\Lib\site-packages\win32com\client\makepy.py).
    Select "The Desired Library" in the choose box.
    This will create a wrapper library usable by Python and in the path.
    mylib = win32com.client.Dispatch("DesiredLibraryClass") and use.
    """
    # This line should default to the Python being used by this program.
    os.system(r"Lib\site-packages\win32com\client\makepy.py")

And most of the above code is simply to remind me how to use the makepy.py library as I use it so seldom that I don't remember between invocations. Most of my time is spent using the library it provides which gives me access to the dll. I would love to have this capability in Squeak/Pharo. It enables/empowers the little guy who has ideas but can't go low level. He can do Python/Smalltalk but not C or system level programming.

I see more openness for this in Pharo than Squeak. Sure Squeak would accept such a library if it became available. But there isn't much community desire for such business software. It isn't sexy or fun. But it does get the job done and enables business and commerce.

From squeak.org
"Squeak is the vehicle for a wide range of projects from multimedia applications, educational platforms to commercial web application development."

From pharo-project.org
Pharo's goal is to deliver a clean, innovative, free open-source Smalltalk environment. By providing a stable and small core system, excellent developer tools, and maintained releases, Pharo is an attractive platform to build and deploy mission critical Smalltalk applications.

Which sounds business oriented, business friendly, pro-business?

Nothing in the Squeak statement sounds like business unless your business is multimedia, education and web apps. Mine is none of those. But I want what is in the Pharo description. Yes, I know much of what is in that description is also in Squeak the artifact. Which leads back to vision, goals, leadership and community. Overtime the artifacts will potentially diverge more due to those intangibles. Those elements in Squeak tend towards primarily multimedia and education and only very secondarily Seaside. Whereas those intangibles in Pharo are seeking to build a community of businesses, researchers, students and individuals who want to use Smalltalk as the basis for what is important to them. IMHO this is a very important aspect for building for the future.

Watching the lists, the players, the discussions and my participation in those has lead to these very subjective opinions. I would be extraordinarily please for Squeak to prove me wrong. I think that Squeak can as it becomes smaller and more modular. But that's the artifact. The intangibles would have to be improved also. The intangibles are often as important and sometimes more so than the artifact. And perceptions are a real basis for decisions.

I would love Squeak/Pharo to eliminate or at least incredibly reduce any need, requirement or desire to drop down to Python to accomplish any of my goals or requirements.

Hope this helps.

Jimmie

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Hi Chris,

The Tracing Messages Browser is an excellent tool, does it work in Pharo?
Cheers,

2010/9/20 Chris Muller <[hidden email]>:
--
Hernán Morales
Information Technology Manager,
Institute of Veterinary Genetics.
National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET).
La Plata (1900), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Telephone: +54 (0221) 421-1799.
Internal: 422
Fax: 425-7980 or 421-1799.

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No, but I doubt it would be very hard for someone to implement..

On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 8:38 AM, Hernán Morales Durand
<[hidden email]> wrote:
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Hi, i’m one of the — hobbyist — end users..

All i read about Morphic is really thrilling, and all i miss is documentation. Expecially on the subject of what design principles Morphic was designed in mind with.

All i could find about Morphic was the
- one chapter in the Pharo/Squeak by Example book,
- the original Self documentation
- and a thesis on the subject of „Naked Objects“ which talks a bit about the ideas that might have been behind Morphic.

The little bit of Morphic i could understand seems really interesting and i would really love someone could explain the ideas (it seems it had a different design principle in mind than the MVC paradigm?) of Morphic in Pharo/Squeak more thoroughly to „end users“.

It also seems that other users have similar problems: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/670727/writing-a-gui-in-squeak

CONTENTS DELETED

> All i could find about Morphic was the
> - one chapter in the Pharo/Squeak by Example book,
> - the original Self documentation
> - and a thesis on the subject of „Naked Objects“ which talks a bit about the
> ideas that might have been behind Morphic.

Here you go:

    http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/CollectiveNBlueBook/morphic.final.pdf

This is chapter 2 of the "New Blue Book" which describes Morphic
top-to-bottom.  From design-principles to proper implementation of
your #drawOn: method.

This is just one of many books that you can read on-line at:

    http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html

 - Chris




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On 9/22/10, Chris Muller <[hidden email]> wrote:
The chapter is still a good introduction. The only thing is that now
every Morph has the capability to do the layout of its submorphs. So
there is no need for an AlignmentMorph anymore.

Class comment of AlignmentMorph in current Squeak 4.1
"Used for layout.
Since all morphs now support layoutPolicy the main use of this class
is no longer needed.
Kept around for compability.
Supports a few methods not found elsewhere that can be convenient, eg. newRow
"


See also some info which still holds on

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1820   (Morph)

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1285 (Morphic Architecture)



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Thank you Sean, for bringing up this topic,

joining a bit late, here a few remarks.

--Hannes

On 9/17/10, DeNigris Sean <[hidden email]> wrote:
> I was doing a lot of playing with Morphic this week at ESUG in Barcelona.
> Many people seem to really not like it and complain about it, but it seems
> very vague i.e. they can't point to a specific problem with it.
>
> I think it's amazingly powerful and universally misunderstood.  Many people
> are pushing for native widgets for end users, which I think is awesome, but
> serves a different role.  For me, there are two use cases:
> 1. People (mostly Smalltalkers, including myself) interested in the UI's of
> the future and exploring what's possible

Yes,

> 2. People who love their (e.g. Mac) look and feel or are in a setting (e.g.
> enterprise) where they have to use a particular GUI.

Yes

Which method did you like best?

There are some notes on this issue at
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2477
( Eddie Cottongim writes: I know of three main ways to handle events
in Morphic.......)

I assume Juan does not have this variety anymore in his CUIS image.....


Conclusion: It might be worthwile to find out more how Juan has pruned
Morphic in Cuis and if it is still valuable for use, document that and
put it to use in Squeak and Pharo.

I have started reading the Cuis code, it is helpful for understanding
Morphic and once you know your way around you do not mind so much that
there are a lot of other things.

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On Mon, 20 Sep 2010, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
The post in itself may be impressive, but take into account that Stephane
asked the question after people being unhappy about ESUG supporting the
developement of an XML-RPC library for Pharo/Squeak.
Someone has to write those bindings. If there's no need expressed for such
bindings, they won't be written. Btw there's a package named COM on
SqueakSource.

>
> From squeak.org
> "Squeak is the vehicle for a wide range of projects from multimedia applications, educational platforms to commercial web application development."
>
> From pharo-project.org
> Pharo's goal is to deliver a clean, innovative, free open-source Smalltalk environment. By providing a stable and small core system, excellent
> developer tools, and maintained releases, Pharo is an attractive platform to build and deploy mission critical Smalltalk applications.
>
> Which sounds business oriented, business friendly, pro-business?

The first one is the last sentence of Squeak's description from
squeak.org. It doesn't tell us the goals of Squeak, it tells us what it
is (or was when the text was written). The first two sentence of the
description tells a lot more about Squeak:

"Squeak is a modern, open source, full-featured implementation of the
powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment. Squeak is
highly-portable - even its virtual machine is written entirely in
Smalltalk making it easy to debug, analyze, and change."

The second one describes (reached and unreached) goals of Pharo.
It's hard to compare those, because they don't describe the same thing.
AFAIK the goals of Squeak are not available on squeak.org, the mailing
list and the Board's site give you more information about this.
IMHO you can help this by dropping a note to the mailing lists whenever
you have to use Python instead of Pharo/Squeak.

>
> Hope this helps.

Yes, it was helpful, thanks.


Levente

>
> Jimmie
>
>
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On Tue, 21 Sep 2010, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
What are the other reasons?

>
>>> In the past, project got hudge resources (ie Sophie), this project
>>> failed to give back to the community in a proper way. Was it because
>>
>> I don't really get this, which project are you talking about?
>
> Sophie.

Why can't we have stuff from Sophie back to Squeak/Pharo?
- only the Sophie developers are familiar with the code and they are not
motivated enough to extract it
- the license is BSD, so the code can't be included in Pharo/Squeak


Levente
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