New Pharo article at The Cohort

Andrew,

Thanks for sharing those articles. Is nice to see that Grafoscopio is showcased in the "little brother" story. I agreed that most of the processing could be happening on the edges of the network instead of in the Big Data centers (Cisco CEO thinks the same, which is not surprising). I defined such edges as "pocket infrastructures"  which is an arrangement of tools which are characterized for being simple, self contained, and working fine on-line and off-line and run in a wide spectrum of hardware, from USB drives to modest laptops and beyond (and in between), which contrast sharply with the exclusionary discourse, infrastructure and practice of "Big Data" and the classical idea of predicting the future by hyping only a part of it. Using such pocket infrastructures (as Grafosocpio and Fossil, linked in the previous mail), we can put in "everybody's pockets" the tools for being a data/digital citizen, instead in only the places with "deep pockets" (money, resources, big data centers, monstrous data bases & data sets and so on), and with some prototypes, like the one of the Panama Papers, we have showed that is possible to approach in a more inclusive way, problems that has been approached only from the Big Data perspective. This also means an alternative way of dealing with data. Instead of being the data threshing machine that tries to process everything, we try to "build the magnet to find the needle in the haystack", focusing on frictionless interconnected data [1] and zooming out from there.

[1] https://blog.okfn.org/2013/04/24/frictionless-data-making-it-radically-easier-to-get-stuff-done-with-data/

Here’s a list of the articles @ https://medium.com/@dasein42/latest, in case any catch your eye:

 

Latest

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 14

“Dynamics Trumps Semantics”: Why Java is Easy to Learn, but Difficult to be Good at.

 

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 8

IoT Initiative — “little brother”

 

The core notion behind “little brother” is to overcome the inevitable lag between the increase in…

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 7

Software Developer Tooling: Then and Now

 

While my criticisms of current tooling for development are often met with an attitude of…

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6

 

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 5

 

The Inverted Ambiguity of the Post-Modern Public, or Not

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 5

Someone Was Asking About Devops …

 

Someone I know was asking me about devops the other day, particularly the number and variety of…

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5

 

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 5

Reality and the ‘Simple’ True, or the True-in-Itself, or the Truth

 

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 5

What is Intended by the term “Object-Oriented”?

 

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1

1 response

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 4

Pharo Smalltalk as a DSL Without a DSL

 

If anyone has written a DSL in Eclipse, for example, simply the base projects Eclipse…

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22

 

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 4

 

Tooling: Design of Meta and Underlying Rationale

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 2

 

How the Results of Disruption Changes the Discussion Between Aficionados of Specific Languages and Environments

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 2

Disrupted Software the Disrupted Software Industry Uses to Build Disruptive Software

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 2

Software is Virtual; the Virtual is Disruptive; Software Disrupts the Development of Software

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Andrew Glynn

Nov 2

Three Comments from a Conversation on a Mailing List

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10

 

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Andrew Glynn

Oct 28

Reasons … and Reasons , How the Software Industry Turns its Issues into Subscriptions

 

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12

 

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Andrew Glynn

Oct 19

A Commentary On Three Quotes From “Working on the Go Team at Google”

(https://medium.com/@ljrudberg/working-on-the-go-team-at-google-917b2c8d35ff)

“First, a little bit about myself: I am 23 years old, less than two years out of my undergrad degree at UW…

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1 response

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Andrew Glynn

Oct 11

Building-With Versus Building-On:

Improving Software Development Incrementally

Three articles and a doctoral thesis that I came across or had pointed out to me recently deal with the state of the software industry from different angles. However different they are, they do relate, and by putting them…

 

 

From: [hidden email]
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2017 5:10 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] New Pharo article at The Cohort

 

First of all, you need to understand that this article, like nearly all of
my other articles, is about /marketing/. I've never made any bones about
this.

If you know anything about marketing, you know that it involves exaggeration
and hyperbole. It sometimes involves bending the truth. The point of
marketing is to persuade on an emotional level, not a logical one.

This is exactly what companies like Apple and Microsoft do. If you think
Apple ads tell the absolute truth, then you are terribly naive.

So, is Pharo being used to fight Ebola? Not exactly, but who cares? I'm
trying to change people's perception. I'm trying to *move* them. If I have
to exaggerate, I will do so.

 

Actually there is a guy that I know that he actually cares

 

very much

 

he is called 

 

"Mr Law"

 

When a marketing , bends the truth and especially when it lies under UK, Greek  and European Law is called "fraud" and it punishable under crimininal (jail time) and civil (compensation for damaged cause by fraudalent marketing) law. The penalties can be extemely severe if the fraud caused a substantial amount of damage in some way.

 

Under those legal systems I have studied (I am a lawyer) the only case that someone is allowed to lie is when he defiends himself. If you ever wondered how its possible lawyers to lie , now you know. Lying and bending the truth in this case is a legal principe set since ancient times by law to provide extra pressure to prove the a party is guilty. Its called "proof beyond reasonable doubt" and is  a very important legal principle. 

 

Outside that, say I submited a document as a defense lawyer that is edited or changed in some way , its fraud and especially fraud against the court is even more punished. If a witeness , exaggerates , bends the truth and especially if he or she lies, its fraud and the court can send him straigh to jail with his lawyer.

 

Apple certainly does not do what you.

 

Actually Apple goes to great lenghts proving its claims , usually when Apple says "iPhone has a battery of 10 hours" you will see an asterisk that will point you to small letters in the bottom of the page that says exactly under which conditions 10 hours can be achieved. 

 

On the other hand its use of words like "magical" is not of objective value and by no means can misled or tell a lie because well, magic does not exist. The law assumes the a person has at least average intelligence and knowledge (exceptions of course people with mental disablities).  Most of the words that Apple uses in the ads that could be considered lies or bend truth are purely subjective terms. 

 

https://www.apple.com/iphone/

 

"Your face is now your password. Face ID is a secure and private new way to unlock, authenticate, and pay."

 

Say some experts come forward and prove that Apple's technology is not safe and especially if they prove that Apple knew it was not safe when it launched it, Apple is liable under law for fraud. 

 

There is of course a lot of illegal marketing out there, fraud after all is according to my experience the most common offenses that I have came accross in my 10 years carrier as a lawyer , but I can assure you just it may happen quite often does not make it any less illegal. You going to be shocked how many illegal things happens on the internet and the law's complexity and sophistication in providing protection against those things.

 

Of course I am not saying that someone is going to bother sue you tommorow, as its highly unlikely that someone will take your posts seriously as they are dominated by exaggerations and I have told you so many times in the past. But that does not mean he cannot. 

 

Maybe USA law is more relaxed, because it not the most respected legal system, as USA has a notorious bad record with human right and consumer protection. But none the less I can promise you in Europe, what you do is not legal and there are special legislation to protect consumers for these scenarios.

 

Agreed. This obsession with popularity in North America is kind of sad when is looked from elsewhere and is really pervasive: from teenagers comedies to technologies and business. Any community needs "proper size" to keep momentum and agility. Too big, it become bureaucratic or stagnant. Too little, it become fragile and non supportive.

Cheers,

Offray

The amount of FUD spread by M$ and IBM, just two very noticeable examples out of numerous others, is possible because very few of those laws are applicable unless the statement is part of a paid campaign by the originating company.  If I exaggerate how well my MB 400E was made on a blog post, neither I nor MB are likely to run into any legal issues.  If MB does so in an advertisement, it becomes a different matter.

 

That said, I don’t think merit is really in question.  There are two bigger ones: 

 

1. To whose advantage is inefficient development and the tooling that promotes it?

 

2. How would people who find it too difficult to maintain state in a single threaded language acclimatize themselves to Pharo Smalltalk (or to any actual programming language, for that matter) ?

 

The first question doesn’t have one answer, since it’s to the advantage of a number of interested parties, from large organizations that can afford inefficiency more than smaller competitors (and simultaneously can afford the not inconsequential investment in writing a proprietary Smalltalk or something similar for things that “must work”), to click-bait online ‘forums’ such as “Slack Overload”. 

 

The second, well, I suppose how you would answer it depends on your experience working with said people.  My own hasn’t been particularly positive.

 

Not that I’m particularly enamoured with the idea of Pharo becoming mainstream.  It would then be subject to the same disruption as current mainstream environments.  The degradation of Java environments over the past 20 years is a good example.  It was never great, but the combination of syntactic parmesan to hide the bad spaghetti and the need to support every passing fad has made it nearly unusable. I’ve seen a number of companies specifying Java 7 or even Java 6 in their tech stacks “because Java 8 is too unreliable”.

 

Until mainstream “software engineers” start acting like engineers, i.e. people who make things work, rather than popularity contestants or fashion victims, that won’t change.

 

Andrew Glynn

 

From: [hidden email]
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2017 6:19 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] New Pharo article at The Cohort

 

I'm obviously missing a lot of the context here, but in  my

country (New Zealand) there is something called the

Fair Trading Act.

 

My understanding from reading the Commerce Commission web

site is that

  - false or misleading representations about goods or

    services or the availability of goods are against the

    law

  - "The penalties for breaching the Act can be severe"

    (Grant Harris).

  - obviously wild exaggerations made to be funny are sort

    of OK, but if anyone falls for them you could find this

    tested in court

  - "Any claims made to bolster the image of a business or

    its products or services must be accurate."

  - "The Act applies even when there was no intention to

    breach the Act".  (Grant Harris again.)

 

http://www.comcom.govt.nz/fair-trading/fair-trading-act-fact-sheets/claiming-you-re-something-you-re-not/

 

The Fair Trading Act was passed as part of a program of market

liberalisation and in order to foster competition and market

efficiency, and the majority of the cases have been trader-to-

trader.  Why mention this?  Because it's not just places where

consumer protection is high-ranked that have such laws; it's

also places that are gung-ho about free markets and competition

and want to protect businesses.

 

Law in the USA varies from state to state.  For California, see

https://www.truthinadvertising.org/california/

(which has a navbar on the right for other states).

 

Me, I think Pharo is good enough to "sell" on its merits

without any exaggerations.  (If you could combine the great

looks of Dolphin Smalltalk with the great features of Pharo,

drool...)