Saving a Smalltalk Project

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Re: Saving a Smalltalk Project

Stephan Eggermont-3
Todd Blanchard <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, why do you want an OODB?

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5602




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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

tblanchard
In reply to this post by NorbertHartl
OK, I have to push back at this.

When Pharo forked I was excited because Squeak was such a fast moving lab experiment that you couldn't build anything and expect it to work in a year.

Pharo was supposed to be the "business ready" fork leaving Squeak to be the crazy lab experiment.


It says:

Pharo's goal is to deliver a clean, innovative, free and open-source immersive environment. 

By providing a stable and small core system, excellent developing tools, and maintained releases, Pharo is an attractive platform to build and deploy mission critical applications.

But you are telling me that Pharo is also a fast moving lab experiment that is too unstable for real work?

I understand this is hard but is there a definitive roadmap and plan to reach to stability?

On May 6, 2018, at 4:00 AM, Norbert Hartl <[hidden email]> wrote:

Can you elaborate on what you consider as a kernel? There are always things moving in the pharo world. The last years the virtual machine got some iterations and it is still not fully stable. For pharo it is hard to have it stable because we feel the need that a lot of the existing parts need to be replaced to be useful in these times. Furthermore pharo is also prototyping platform for programming language features. All of these are counter-stability measures. So if you need a stable kernel from native ground up to UI pharo won‘t be that thing you are looking for the coming years (if at all). You always need to adopt to change so you need to define your required scope better in order to get an estimate.

Norbert

Am 06.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it.  I have now frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can build on.  According to Stephan, this is not so. Is there any plan for creating a stable Pharo kernel that people can use for building software of lasting value for millions of non-expert users? 
--Thanks, Trygve

On 05.05.2018 13:53, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
I’ve taken a look at what would be needed to
support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it
professionally on squeak and has not enough capacity to keep up with
changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it. Twice a year
or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there are
no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep implementation
specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a lot
of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on
pharo last

Stephan

-- 
The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal. 
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27 

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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

horrido
I was thinking the same thing. Enterprises need to rely on a stable
distribution over a long period of time. That's why many Linux distros have
LTS versions.

That's why VisualWorks is the enterprise standard.



tblanchard wrote

> OK, I have to push back at this.
>
> When Pharo forked I was excited because Squeak was such a fast moving lab
> experiment that you couldn't build anything and expect it to work in a
> year.
>
> Pharo was supposed to be the "business ready" fork leaving Squeak to be
> the crazy lab experiment.
>
> From https://pharo.org/about
>
> It says:
>
> Pharo's goal is to deliver a clean, innovative, free and open-source
> immersive environment.
>
> By providing a stable and small core system, excellent developing tools,
> and maintained releases, Pharo is an attractive platform to build and
> deploy mission critical applications.
>
> But you are telling me that Pharo is also a fast moving lab experiment
> that is too unstable for real work?
>
> I understand this is hard but is there a definitive roadmap and plan to
> reach to stability?
>
>> On May 6, 2018, at 4:00 AM, Norbert Hartl &lt;

> norbert@

> &gt; wrote:
>>
>> Can you elaborate on what you consider as a kernel? There are always
>> things moving in the pharo world. The last years the virtual machine got
>> some iterations and it is still not fully stable. For pharo it is hard to
>> have it stable because we feel the need that a lot of the existing parts
>> need to be replaced to be useful in these times. Furthermore pharo is
>> also prototyping platform for programming language features. All of these
>> are counter-stability measures. So if you need a stable kernel from
>> native ground up to UI pharo won‘t be that thing you are looking for the
>> coming years (if at all). You always need to adopt to change so you need
>> to define your required scope better in order to get an estimate.
>>
>> Norbert
>>
>> Am 06.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug &lt;

> trygver@.uio

>  &lt;mailto:

> trygver@.uio

> &gt;>:
>>
>>> I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer
>>> who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I
>>> have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform
>>> because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it.  I have now
>>> frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a
>>> better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can
>>> build on.  According to Stephan, this is not so. Is there any plan for
>>> creating a stable Pharo kernel that people can use for building software
>>> of lasting value for millions of non-expert users?
>>> --Thanks, Trygve
>>>
>>> On 05.05.2018 13:53, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
>>>> I’ve taken a look at what would be needed to
>>>> support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it
>>>> professionally on squeak and has not enough capacity to keep up with
>>>> changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it. Twice a
>>>> year
>>>> or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there
>>>> are
>>>> no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep
>>>> implementation
>>>> specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a
>>>> lot
>>>> of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on
>>>> pharo last
>>>>
>>>> Stephan
>>>
>>> --
>>> The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to
>>> achieve a goal.
>>> Trygve Reenskaug      mailto:

> trygver@.uio

>  &lt;mailto:%

> 20trygver@.uio

> &gt;
>>> Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
>>> &lt;http://folk.uio.no/trygver/&gt;
>>> N-0378 Oslo             http://fullOO.info &lt;http://fulloo.info/&gt;
>>> Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27





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

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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

NorbertHartl
In reply to this post by tblanchard
As you are not biased to understand what I was saying can you please define what „stability“ means to you? 

After all those years I‘m fed up with people using terms like „stability“ or „scability“ as if the were self-explaining. The same goes for „enterprise needs“. They are not, they are defined within the scope if their requirements. 

I have more than 100 pharo images running and these are pretty stable. Why? Because pharo is stable enough and I am capable of doing the rest to make it right for my needs.

On the other hand if I were into writing UI based tools I know there will be a lot of changes in the coming years. So nothing to expect regarding stability.

If you work in an enterprise your definition of stability can be defined as static/non-moving stability. It just means you don‘t have to cope with everyday changes but the gap of your software to actual software gets bigger every day. And with every day it is more unlikely someone is brave enough to decide to move on and to catch up with the rest. 

etc. etc.

Norbert

Am 06.05.2018 um 21:16 schrieb Todd Blanchard <[hidden email]>:

OK, I have to push back at this.

When Pharo forked I was excited because Squeak was such a fast moving lab experiment that you couldn't build anything and expect it to work in a year.

Pharo was supposed to be the "business ready" fork leaving Squeak to be the crazy lab experiment.


It says:

Pharo's goal is to deliver a clean, innovative, free and open-source immersive environment. 

By providing a stable and small core system, excellent developing tools, and maintained releases, Pharo is an attractive platform to build and deploy mission critical applications.

But you are telling me that Pharo is also a fast moving lab experiment that is too unstable for real work?

I understand this is hard but is there a definitive roadmap and plan to reach to stability?

On May 6, 2018, at 4:00 AM, Norbert Hartl <[hidden email]> wrote:

Can you elaborate on what you consider as a kernel? There are always things moving in the pharo world. The last years the virtual machine got some iterations and it is still not fully stable. For pharo it is hard to have it stable because we feel the need that a lot of the existing parts need to be replaced to be useful in these times. Furthermore pharo is also prototyping platform for programming language features. All of these are counter-stability measures. So if you need a stable kernel from native ground up to UI pharo won‘t be that thing you are looking for the coming years (if at all). You always need to adopt to change so you need to define your required scope better in order to get an estimate.

Norbert

Am 06.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it.  I have now frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can build on.  According to Stephan, this is not so. Is there any plan for creating a stable Pharo kernel that people can use for building software of lasting value for millions of non-expert users? 
--Thanks, Trygve

On 05.05.2018 13:53, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
I’ve taken a look at what would be needed to
support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it
professionally on squeak and has not enough capacity to keep up with
changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it. Twice a year
or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there are
no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep implementation
specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a lot
of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on
pharo last

Stephan

-- 
The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal. 
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27 

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Re: Saving a Smalltalk Project

tblanchard
In reply to this post by Sven Van Caekenberghe-2
Postgres is indeed awesome - but pretty heavy for a resource constrained IoT client. It’s great on the server though.

Sent from the road

> On May 6, 2018, at 10:36, Sven Van Caekenberghe <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> PostgreSQL is a totally valid alternative as well. It is a real RDBMS, cross platform, open source, with wide support. We have two network level drivers in Pharo (PostgresV2 and recently P3) and it works well under GLORP.
>
>> On 6 May 2018, at 19:10, Todd Blanchard <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> Just out of curiosity, why do you want an OODB?
>>
>> SQLite has a plethora of tools, powerful query capabilities, can be migrated with very little pain, and can act a bit like an OODB using GLORP.
>>
>> I have lost too many data sets to proprietary OODBs to ever trust one again.
>>
>>> On May 6, 2018, at 10:00 AM, horrido <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>
>>> Just out of curiosity, which object database is recommended for Pharo?
>>> Something that is reliably up-to-date as Pharo changes.
>>>
>>>
>>> Stephan Eggermont-3 wrote
>>>> Sean P. DeNigris &lt;
>>>
>>>> sean@
>>>
>>>> &gt; wrote:
>>>>> OT: It's ironic that Smalltalkers are often accused of NIH syndrome, but
>>>>> the
>>>>> first reaction of people from less "productive" languages/systems is to
>>>>> rewrite a working Smalltalk app in their language of comfort…
>>>>
>>>> Indeed. And rewriting something that also uses an OODB is going to kill
>>>> productivity even more. I’ve taken a look at what would be needed to
>>>> support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it
>>>> professionally on squeak and has not enough capacity to keep up with
>>>> changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it. Twice a year
>>>> or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there are
>>>> no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep implementation
>>>> specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a
>>>> lot
>>>> of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on
>>>> pharo last
>>>>
>>>> Stephan
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
>>
>
>

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Re: Saving a Smalltalk Project

tblanchard
In reply to this post by Stephan Eggermont-3
It sounds great...until something goes wrong. I wouldn’t choose it for important data. I might use it as a local cache. Especially when it has a single maintainer I could go to for help.


Sent from the road

> On May 6, 2018, at 11:44, Stephan Eggermont <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Todd Blanchard <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> Just out of curiosity, why do you want an OODB?
>
> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5602
>
>
>
>

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Re: Saving a Smalltalk Project

itlists@schrievkrom.de
From my current experiences ... the people do not choose OODBs, because
in the mainstream languages the stuff is simply not visible (market
share). The knowledge is not there and the biggest problem - a
programming interfaces are not available.

People use RDBMS oder NoSQl systems, because these systems offer a
programming model to developers - even if they are simply bad. And they
offer language independent access to the data.

Some people are moving from RDBMS to NoSQL-system, because they hope to
get more OO-programming in the database.

Thats also a problem with Gemstone/S. Its a wonderful database, but
it offers no default programming model to external developers - so it
will never be attractive to non-Smalltalk developers.



Am 06.05.2018 um 23:08 schrieb Todd Blanchard:

> It sounds great...until something goes wrong. I wouldn’t choose it for important data. I might use it as a local cache. Especially when it has a single maintainer I could go to for help.
>
>
> Sent from the road
>
>> On May 6, 2018, at 11:44, Stephan Eggermont <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> Todd Blanchard <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>> Just out of curiosity, why do you want an OODB?
>>
>> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5602
>>
>>
>>
>>
>

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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

Trygve
In reply to this post by NorbertHartl
Thanks for your quick answer.  I have only a fleeting knowledge of Pharo but liked what I saw. The Squeak class library has seen organic growth since 1978 or earlier. Pharo gave it a thorough overhaul. At the Pharo kernel was a minimal image with a minimal class library. The rest of the functionality was partitioned into packages that could be added to the kernel image as required. Beautiful. But only my dream?
Matthew 7:24-27: And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that  house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And  everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand."
I am developing an IDE for non-programmers  called BabyIDE, a non-intrusive extension of Squeak. Where the Class Browser in Squeak is used to work with one class at the time, the BabyIDE browser is used to work with structures of collaborating objects, ignoring their classes. I would like to develop a BabyIDE image that gets broad usage and long life. I'm looking for a rock to build on and hoped it could be what I thought was the Pharo kernel+ a few selected packages. In your answer, I read that if I build BabyIDE on Pharo, I will be building on sand.

pharo.org writes: "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language...".  The only language I can see is defined by the release image. A Pharo programmer builds application programs in this language. He or she can add new classes, change existing ones, subclass them, add or change methods, change the Smalltalk dictionary, etc. etc.  An extremely flexible and powerful language.

A tale from the future when Pharo is a mainstream language: Business customers benefit from end users using applications that are written by Pharo programmers who built on the Pharo language and environment that had been developed by the Pharo community. One day there is a happy announcement: A new version of Pharo will be launched tomorrow. It is truly cool and includes any number of improvements, some of them documented. And, by the way, applications written in the current Pharo will no longer work. So please inform your customers that you will not be able to serve them for a while. We are confident that all your application programmers will be happy to drop whatever they are doing in order to adapt their applications to the new Pharo so that you can start serving your customers again.

Cheers
--Trygve
 


On 06.05.2018 13:00, Norbert Hartl wrote:
Can you elaborate on what you consider as a kernel? There are always things moving in the pharo world. The last years the virtual machine got some iterations and it is still not fully stable. For pharo it is hard to have it stable because we feel the need that a lot of the existing parts need to be replaced to be useful in these times. Furthermore pharo is also prototyping platform for programming language features. All of these are counter-stability measures. So if you need a stable kernel from native ground up to UI pharo won‘t be that thing you are looking for the coming years (if at all). You always need to adopt to change so you need to define your required scope better in order to get an estimate.

Norbert

Am 06.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it.  I have now frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can build on.  According to Stephan, this is not so. Is there any plan for creating a stable Pharo kernel that people can use for building software of lasting value for millions of non-expert users?
--Thanks, Trygve

On 05.05.2018 13:53, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
I’ve taken a look at what would be needed to
support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it
professionally on squeak and has not enough capacity to keep up with
changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it. Twice a year
or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there are
no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep implementation
specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a lot
of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on
pharo last

Stephan

--

The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal.
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27


--

The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal.
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27

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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

NorbertHartl
I understand what you are saying but it contains some misconceptions about the modern software world. 

„The earth is not stopping to turn just because you want to stay on the sunny side“

There is two funny concepts going on in the modern software industry. The one tells you that because you want to do a product everything else around you should come to a full stop so can comfortably build your software not disturbed by other things. The second one tells you that you _have to upgrade_ … there is this magical force preventing you from staying where you are. Both notions are funny alone but they come combined and then they turn out to be a non-sensical monster.

Let’s take a different approach. Put in everything you say about software, libraries, etc the word version. So you can build upon Pharo version 3 your own product. You can stay at that version and it won’t change. If the software you sell is not 80% pharo but your own you should not have a problem just to stay on that version because you develop your own stuff. But still the world did not stop turning and there is pharo 4. You decide there are a few nice features but the work to adjust is too big to take the risk. Then there is pharo 5 and you … nahhh not this time….Then there is pharo6 and they not only changed the image but also the way source code is managed. That prevents you further from adjusting. But hey you can still be happy with pharo3 and it does not change. 

So what is the real problem? Yes, money/time is not enough. I think there are a lot of people risking their health to promote pharo and now we have a consortium that can pay engineers to do work on pharo. So let me tell you a future story:

You see what pharo is doing and you think it is good. You can also see that there are too less resources to proceed in the way you need it to go. So you decide to show pharo to the world inspiring people with some kind of a vision. The result is that more people pay into the consortium and we hire more engineers. And then one day the consortium has enough money to pay engineers that can care about a LTS (long term support) version of pharo. So you can stay on pharo version 3 and still get those annoying bugs fixed. And hey this team has also enough time to provide you with tools that make a migration to pharo version 4 more easy and less annoying for you. And then you have your own product based on pharo version 4. And then for version 5, version 6,…. Sounds like a dream…but hey…it is indeed realistic. It just depends on how the people approach it

How does this sound?

Norbert

Am 07.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

Thanks for your quick answer.  I have only a fleeting knowledge of Pharo but liked what I saw. The Squeak class library has seen organic growth since 1978 or earlier. Pharo gave it a thorough overhaul. At the Pharo kernel was a minimal image with a minimal class library. The rest of the functionality was partitioned into packages that could be added to the kernel image as required. Beautiful. But only my dream?
Matthew 7:24-27: And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that  house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And  everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand."
I am developing an IDE for non-programmers  called BabyIDE, a non-intrusive extension of Squeak. Where the Class Browser in Squeak is used to work with one class at the time, the BabyIDE browser is used to work with structures of collaborating objects, ignoring their classes. I would like to develop a BabyIDE image that gets broad usage and long life. I'm looking for a rock to build on and hoped it could be what I thought was the Pharo kernel+ a few selected packages. In your answer, I read that if I build BabyIDE on Pharo, I will be building on sand.

pharo.org writes: "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language...".  The only language I can see is defined by the release image. A Pharo programmer builds application programs in this language. He or she can add new classes, change existing ones, subclass them, add or change methods, change the Smalltalk dictionary, etc. etc.  An extremely flexible and powerful language.

A tale from the future when Pharo is a mainstream language: Business customers benefit from end users using applications that are written by Pharo programmers who built on the Pharo language and environment that had been developed by the Pharo community. One day there is a happy announcement: A new version of Pharo will be launched tomorrow. It is truly cool and includes any number of improvements, some of them documented. And, by the way, applications written in the current Pharo will no longer work. So please inform your customers that you will not be able to serve them for a while. We are confident that all your application programmers will be happy to drop whatever they are doing in order to adapt their applications to the new Pharo so that you can start serving your customers again.

Cheers
--Trygve
 


On 06.05.2018 13:00, Norbert Hartl wrote:
Can you elaborate on what you consider as a kernel? There are always things moving in the pharo world. The last years the virtual machine got some iterations and it is still not fully stable. For pharo it is hard to have it stable because we feel the need that a lot of the existing parts need to be replaced to be useful in these times. Furthermore pharo is also prototyping platform for programming language features. All of these are counter-stability measures. So if you need a stable kernel from native ground up to UI pharo won‘t be that thing you are looking for the coming years (if at all). You always need to adopt to change so you need to define your required scope better in order to get an estimate.

Norbert

Am 06.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it.  I have now frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can build on.  According to Stephan, this is not so. Is there any plan for creating a stable Pharo kernel that people can use for building software of lasting value for millions of non-expert users? 
--Thanks, Trygve

On 05.05.2018 13:53, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
I’ve taken a look at what would be needed to
support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it
professionally on squeak and has not enough capacity to keep up with
changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it. Twice a year
or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there are
no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep implementation
specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a lot
of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on
pharo last

Stephan

-- 
The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal. 
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27 

-- 
The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal. 
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27 

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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

Trygve
Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc programs stopped working because their runtime systems had changed.
Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc compilers stopped compiling old code because the languages had changed.

On 07.05.2018 11:57, Norbert Hartl wrote:
I understand what you are saying but it contains some misconceptions about the modern software world. 

„The earth is not stopping to turn just because you want to stay on the sunny side“

There is two funny concepts going on in the modern software industry. The one tells you that because you want to do a product everything else around you should come to a full stop so can comfortably build your software not disturbed by other things. The second one tells you that you _have to upgrade_ … there is this magical force preventing you from staying where you are. Both notions are funny alone but they come combined and then they turn out to be a non-sensical monster.

Let’s take a different approach. Put in everything you say about software, libraries, etc the word version. So you can build upon Pharo version 3 your own product. You can stay at that version and it won’t change. If the software you sell is not 80% pharo but your own you should not have a problem just to stay on that version because you develop your own stuff. But still the world did not stop turning and there is pharo 4. You decide there are a few nice features but the work to adjust is too big to take the risk. Then there is pharo 5 and you … nahhh not this time….Then there is pharo6 and they not only changed the image but also the way source code is managed. That prevents you further from adjusting. But hey you can still be happy with pharo3 and it does not change. 

So what is the real problem? Yes, money/time is not enough. I think there are a lot of people risking their health to promote pharo and now we have a consortium that can pay engineers to do work on pharo. So let me tell you a future story:

You see what pharo is doing and you think it is good. You can also see that there are too less resources to proceed in the way you need it to go. So you decide to show pharo to the world inspiring people with some kind of a vision. The result is that more people pay into the consortium and we hire more engineers. And then one day the consortium has enough money to pay engineers that can care about a LTS (long term support) version of pharo. So you can stay on pharo version 3 and still get those annoying bugs fixed. And hey this team has also enough time to provide you with tools that make a migration to pharo version 4 more easy and less annoying for you. And then you have your own product based on pharo version 4. And then for version 5, version 6,…. Sounds like a dream…but hey…it is indeed realistic. It just depends on how the people approach it

How does this sound?

Norbert

Am 07.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

Thanks for your quick answer.  I have only a fleeting knowledge of Pharo but liked what I saw. The Squeak class library has seen organic growth since 1978 or earlier. Pharo gave it a thorough overhaul. At the Pharo kernel was a minimal image with a minimal class library. The rest of the functionality was partitioned into packages that could be added to the kernel image as required. Beautiful. But only my dream?
Matthew 7:24-27: And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that  house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And  everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand."
I am developing an IDE for non-programmers  called BabyIDE, a non-intrusive extension of Squeak. Where the Class Browser in Squeak is used to work with one class at the time, the BabyIDE browser is used to work with structures of collaborating objects, ignoring their classes. I would like to develop a BabyIDE image that gets broad usage and long life. I'm looking for a rock to build on and hoped it could be what I thought was the Pharo kernel+ a few selected packages. In your answer, I read that if I build BabyIDE on Pharo, I will be building on sand.

pharo.org writes: "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language...".  The only language I can see is defined by the release image. A Pharo programmer builds application programs in this language. He or she can add new classes, change existing ones, subclass them, add or change methods, change the Smalltalk dictionary, etc. etc.  An extremely flexible and powerful language.

A tale from the future when Pharo is a mainstream language: Business customers benefit from end users using applications that are written by Pharo programmers who built on the Pharo language and environment that had been developed by the Pharo community. One day there is a happy announcement: A new version of Pharo will be launched tomorrow. It is truly cool and includes any number of improvements, some of them documented. And, by the way, applications written in the current Pharo will no longer work. So please inform your customers that you will not be able to serve them for a while. We are confident that all your application programmers will be happy to drop whatever they are doing in order to adapt their applications to the new Pharo so that you can start serving your customers again.

Cheers
--Trygve
 


On 06.05.2018 13:00, Norbert Hartl wrote:
Can you elaborate on what you consider as a kernel? There are always things moving in the pharo world. The last years the virtual machine got some iterations and it is still not fully stable. For pharo it is hard to have it stable because we feel the need that a lot of the existing parts need to be replaced to be useful in these times. Furthermore pharo is also prototyping platform for programming language features. All of these are counter-stability measures. So if you need a stable kernel from native ground up to UI pharo won‘t be that thing you are looking for the coming years (if at all). You always need to adopt to change so you need to define your required scope better in order to get an estimate.

Norbert

Am 06.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it.  I have now frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can build on.  According to Stephan, this is not so. Is there any plan for creating a stable Pharo kernel that people can use for building software of lasting value for millions of non-expert users? 
--Thanks, Trygve

On 05.05.2018 13:53, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
I’ve taken a look at what would be needed to
support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it
professionally on squeak and has not enough capacity to keep up with
changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it. Twice a year
or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there are
no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep implementation
specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a lot
of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on
pharo last

Stephan

-- 
The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal. 
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27 

-- 
The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal. 
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27 


--

The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal.
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27

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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

NorbertHartl

Am 07.05.2018 um 12:42 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc programs stopped working because their runtime systems had changed.
Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc compilers stopped compiling old code because the languages had changed.

If we talk about C/C++ the runtime is the operating system. Everytime I update it the linked libraries are suspect to be invalid from then. If you have in the same system update a new version of the C compiler you are doomed. You cannot link your binary with the new libs. And the new C compiler quirks about your code. So what you have then? Staying on an old C language standard? Statically link everything. Ah no that won’t work because you would have to care about all your dependencies being compilable with the new compiler. But you don’t update the compiler meaning you don’t update the operating system. It is the same as staying on pharo 3.

For Java the situation is slightly different because if you use new programming language features you can only do when switching the compiler to the new standard. There is a lot of effort that went into making the java vm recognize the language version and execute regarding that making version compatible. We are in sync here. I told you it is about manpower. Do you know how much manpower it needed and how long it took to add something like closures to the java language? Do you consider java closure to be en par with other languages?

We are sorry not everything is to your liking. It is not even to our own liking because we have dreams far beyond. But we will never get there if we don’t take the effort. And the point of open source (did I mention pharo is open source?? ) is that the ones that do it decide what to do. Nuff said!

Norbert

On 07.05.2018 11:57, Norbert Hartl wrote:
I understand what you are saying but it contains some misconceptions about the modern software world. 

„The earth is not stopping to turn just because you want to stay on the sunny side“

There is two funny concepts going on in the modern software industry. The one tells you that because you want to do a product everything else around you should come to a full stop so can comfortably build your software not disturbed by other things. The second one tells you that you _have to upgrade_ … there is this magical force preventing you from staying where you are. Both notions are funny alone but they come combined and then they turn out to be a non-sensical monster.

Let’s take a different approach. Put in everything you say about software, libraries, etc the word version. So you can build upon Pharo version 3 your own product. You can stay at that version and it won’t change. If the software you sell is not 80% pharo but your own you should not have a problem just to stay on that version because you develop your own stuff. But still the world did not stop turning and there is pharo 4. You decide there are a few nice features but the work to adjust is too big to take the risk. Then there is pharo 5 and you … nahhh not this time….Then there is pharo6 and they not only changed the image but also the way source code is managed. That prevents you further from adjusting. But hey you can still be happy with pharo3 and it does not change. 

So what is the real problem? Yes, money/time is not enough. I think there are a lot of people risking their health to promote pharo and now we have a consortium that can pay engineers to do work on pharo. So let me tell you a future story:

You see what pharo is doing and you think it is good. You can also see that there are too less resources to proceed in the way you need it to go. So you decide to show pharo to the world inspiring people with some kind of a vision. The result is that more people pay into the consortium and we hire more engineers. And then one day the consortium has enough money to pay engineers that can care about a LTS (long term support) version of pharo. So you can stay on pharo version 3 and still get those annoying bugs fixed. And hey this team has also enough time to provide you with tools that make a migration to pharo version 4 more easy and less annoying for you. And then you have your own product based on pharo version 4. And then for version 5, version 6,…. Sounds like a dream…but hey…it is indeed realistic. It just depends on how the people approach it

How does this sound?

Norbert

Am 07.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

Thanks for your quick answer.  I have only a fleeting knowledge of Pharo but liked what I saw. The Squeak class library has seen organic growth since 1978 or earlier. Pharo gave it a thorough overhaul. At the Pharo kernel was a minimal image with a minimal class library. The rest of the functionality was partitioned into packages that could be added to the kernel image as required. Beautiful. But only my dream?
Matthew 7:24-27: And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that  house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And  everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand."
I am developing an IDE for non-programmers  called BabyIDE, a non-intrusive extension of Squeak. Where the Class Browser in Squeak is used to work with one class at the time, the BabyIDE browser is used to work with structures of collaborating objects, ignoring their classes. I would like to develop a BabyIDE image that gets broad usage and long life. I'm looking for a rock to build on and hoped it could be what I thought was the Pharo kernel+ a few selected packages. In your answer, I read that if I build BabyIDE on Pharo, I will be building on sand.

pharo.org writes: "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language...".  The only language I can see is defined by the release image. A Pharo programmer builds application programs in this language. He or she can add new classes, change existing ones, subclass them, add or change methods, change the Smalltalk dictionary, etc. etc.  An extremely flexible and powerful language.

A tale from the future when Pharo is a mainstream language: Business customers benefit from end users using applications that are written by Pharo programmers who built on the Pharo language and environment that had been developed by the Pharo community. One day there is a happy announcement: A new version of Pharo will be launched tomorrow. It is truly cool and includes any number of improvements, some of them documented. And, by the way, applications written in the current Pharo will no longer work. So please inform your customers that you will not be able to serve them for a while. We are confident that all your application programmers will be happy to drop whatever they are doing in order to adapt their applications to the new Pharo so that you can start serving your customers again.

Cheers
--Trygve
 


On 06.05.2018 13:00, Norbert Hartl wrote:
Can you elaborate on what you consider as a kernel? There are always things moving in the pharo world. The last years the virtual machine got some iterations and it is still not fully stable. For pharo it is hard to have it stable because we feel the need that a lot of the existing parts need to be replaced to be useful in these times. Furthermore pharo is also prototyping platform for programming language features. All of these are counter-stability measures. So if you need a stable kernel from native ground up to UI pharo won‘t be that thing you are looking for the coming years (if at all). You always need to adopt to change so you need to define your required scope better in order to get an estimate.

Norbert

Am 06.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it.  I have now frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can build on.  According to Stephan, this is not so. Is there any plan for creating a stable Pharo kernel that people can use for building software of lasting value for millions of non-expert users? 
--Thanks, Trygve

On 05.05.2018 13:53, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
I’ve taken a look at what would be needed to
support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it
professionally on squeak and has not enough capacity to keep up with
changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it. Twice a year
or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there are
no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep implementation
specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a lot
of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on
pharo last

Stephan

-- 
The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal. 
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27 

-- 
The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal. 
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27 


-- 
The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal. 
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27 

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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

Stephan Eggermont-3
In reply to this post by Trygve
Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc programs stopped working because
> their runtime systems had changed.
> Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc compilers stopped compiling old
> code because the languages had changed.
>

Oracle lists 24 behavioral incompatibilities between Java SE 7 and SE 6.

Stephan





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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

Sean P. DeNigris
Administrator
In reply to this post by Trygve
Trygve Reenskaug wrote
> I am developing an IDE for non-programmers  called BabyIDE

I remember seeing this in a screencast - it was very cool!


Trygve Reenskaug wrote
> In your answer, I read that if I build BabyIDE on Pharo, I will be
> building on sand.

Sorry I took so long to reply to your OP. It does indeed *sound* like that
but AFAICT (myself included with dozens of projects), porting to new
versions has been relatively painless. That said, a project like you
described may have additional hurdles because it hooks so deeply into the
inner guts of the IDE. Also, there are continually new techniques to ease
these transitions. For example, there is now a deprecation message which
auto-rewrites sender on first send; this is even more powerful if one has
tests with good coverage because running the tests magically updates your
project.


Trygve Reenskaug wrote
> A tale from the future… drop whatever they are doing in
> order to adapt their applications to the new Pharo so that you can start
> serving your customers again.

It's a hard problem because we have a big vision, which means a natural
tension with backward compatibility. In fact, IMHO that was one of the major
reasons for the fork from Squeak, so I guess it's unfortunate that now
Squeak seems to be a moving target as well. Again, just to reiterate,
AFAICT, most of the changes are generally deep in the system and will not
affect the average customer facing project. Even then, there's no need to be
on the latest, greatest version if the cost doesn't seem worth it. There are
plenty of production systems happily running on Pharo 1.x.

Suggestions are very welcome about how to move toward a bright future with
minimum impact on existing users/projects!!



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

Cheers,
Sean
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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

Trygve
In reply to this post by NorbertHartl
Norbert,
I stand corrected because I have not followed the mainstream languages as well as I probably should. Thank you for your candid answer, it clearly outlines what I can and cannot expect from Pharo and any other ST project.

I go back to Alan Kay's vision of a Dynabook: A personal computer for children of all ages. It should contain all its owner's  personal data, including  his or her personal programs, as they evolve through the years.  Continuity is a must; the owner shall never loose data.

Again, thank you for your answers. They have given invaluable contributions to my thinking.
--Trygve.


On 07.05.2018 14:14, Norbert Hartl wrote:

Am 07.05.2018 um 12:42 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc programs stopped working because their runtime systems had changed.
Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc compilers stopped compiling old code because the languages had changed.

If we talk about C/C++ the runtime is the operating system. Everytime I update it the linked libraries are suspect to be invalid from then. If you have in the same system update a new version of the C compiler you are doomed. You cannot link your binary with the new libs. And the new C compiler quirks about your code. So what you have then? Staying on an old C language standard? Statically link everything. Ah no that won’t work because you would have to care about all your dependencies being compilable with the new compiler. But you don’t update the compiler meaning you don’t update the operating system. It is the same as staying on pharo 3.

For Java the situation is slightly different because if you use new programming language features you can only do when switching the compiler to the new standard. There is a lot of effort that went into making the java vm recognize the language version and execute regarding that making version compatible. We are in sync here. I told you it is about manpower. Do you know how much manpower it needed and how long it took to add something like closures to the java language? Do you consider java closure to be en par with other languages?

We are sorry not everything is to your liking. It is not even to our own liking because we have dreams far beyond. But we will never get there if we don’t take the effort. And the point of open source (did I mention pharo is open source?? ) is that the ones that do it decide what to do. Nuff said!

Norbert

On 07.05.2018 11:57, Norbert Hartl wrote:
I understand what you are saying but it contains some misconceptions about the modern software world. 

„The earth is not stopping to turn just because you want to stay on the sunny side“

There is two funny concepts going on in the modern software industry. The one tells you that because you want to do a product everything else around you should come to a full stop so can comfortably build your software not disturbed by other things. The second one tells you that you _have to upgrade_ … there is this magical force preventing you from staying where you are. Both notions are funny alone but they come combined and then they turn out to be a non-sensical monster.

Let’s take a different approach. Put in everything you say about software, libraries, etc the word version. So you can build upon Pharo version 3 your own product. You can stay at that version and it won’t change. If the software you sell is not 80% pharo but your own you should not have a problem just to stay on that version because you develop your own stuff. But still the world did not stop turning and there is pharo 4. You decide there are a few nice features but the work to adjust is too big to take the risk. Then there is pharo 5 and you … nahhh not this time….Then there is pharo6 and they not only changed the image but also the way source code is managed. That prevents you further from adjusting. But hey you can still be happy with pharo3 and it does not change. 

So what is the real problem? Yes, money/time is not enough. I think there are a lot of people risking their health to promote pharo and now we have a consortium that can pay engineers to do work on pharo. So let me tell you a future story:

You see what pharo is doing and you think it is good. You can also see that there are too less resources to proceed in the way you need it to go. So you decide to show pharo to the world inspiring people with some kind of a vision. The result is that more people pay into the consortium and we hire more engineers. And then one day the consortium has enough money to pay engineers that can care about a LTS (long term support) version of pharo. So you can stay on pharo version 3 and still get those annoying bugs fixed. And hey this team has also enough time to provide you with tools that make a migration to pharo version 4 more easy and less annoying for you. And then you have your own product based on pharo version 4. And then for version 5, version 6,…. Sounds like a dream…but hey…it is indeed realistic. It just depends on how the people approach it

How does this sound?

Norbert

Am 07.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

Thanks for your quick answer.  I have only a fleeting knowledge of Pharo but liked what I saw. The Squeak class library has seen organic growth since 1978 or earlier. Pharo gave it a thorough overhaul. At the Pharo kernel was a minimal image with a minimal class library. The rest of the functionality was partitioned into packages that could be added to the kernel image as required. Beautiful. But only my dream?
Matthew 7:24-27: And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that  house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And  everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand."
I am developing an IDE for non-programmers  called BabyIDE, a non-intrusive extension of Squeak. Where the Class Browser in Squeak is used to work with one class at the time, the BabyIDE browser is used to work with structures of collaborating objects, ignoring their classes. I would like to develop a BabyIDE image that gets broad usage and long life. I'm looking for a rock to build on and hoped it could be what I thought was the Pharo kernel+ a few selected packages. In your answer, I read that if I build BabyIDE on Pharo, I will be building on sand.

pharo.org writes: "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language...".  The only language I can see is defined by the release image. A Pharo programmer builds application programs in this language. He or she can add new classes, change existing ones, subclass them, add or change methods, change the Smalltalk dictionary, etc. etc.  An extremely flexible and powerful language.

A tale from the future when Pharo is a mainstream language: Business customers benefit from end users using applications that are written by Pharo programmers who built on the Pharo language and environment that had been developed by the Pharo community. One day there is a happy announcement: A new version of Pharo will be launched tomorrow. It is truly cool and includes any number of improvements, some of them documented. And, by the way, applications written in the current Pharo will no longer work. So please inform your customers that you will not be able to serve them for a while. We are confident that all your application programmers will be happy to drop whatever they are doing in order to adapt their applications to the new Pharo so that you can start serving your customers again.

Cheers
--Trygve
 


On 06.05.2018 13:00, Norbert Hartl wrote:
Can you elaborate on what you consider as a kernel? There are always things moving in the pharo world. The last years the virtual machine got some iterations and it is still not fully stable. For pharo it is hard to have it stable because we feel the need that a lot of the existing parts need to be replaced to be useful in these times. Furthermore pharo is also prototyping platform for programming language features. All of these are counter-stability measures. So if you need a stable kernel from native ground up to UI pharo won‘t be that thing you are looking for the coming years (if at all). You always need to adopt to change so you need to define your required scope better in order to get an estimate.

Norbert

Am 06.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it.  I have now frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can build on.  According to Stephan, this is not so. Is there any plan for creating a stable Pharo kernel that people can use for building software of lasting value for millions of non-expert users? 
--Thanks, Trygve

On 05.05.2018 13:53, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
I’ve taken a look at what would be needed to
support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it
professionally on squeak and has not enough capacity to keep up with
changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it. Twice a year
or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there are
no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep implementation
specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a lot
of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on
pharo last

Stephan

--
--

The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal.
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27

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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

NorbertHartl


Am 08.05.2018 um 08:30 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

Norbert,
I stand corrected because I have not followed the mainstream languages as well as I probably should. Thank you for your candid answer, it clearly outlines what I can and cannot expect from Pharo and any other ST project. 

Ok, I didn’t want to sound too harsh but for me there is no benefit in telling something which is not true. And as a member of such community you get sometimes allergic to things that sound negative because that happens far too often. What I said about not upgrading is the thing we suffer from. While you find it that squeak has moved too fast we consider it that it didn’t move enough. That is why a lot of the sub-systems need to be replaced and that causes instability. For me the stability is outstanding if I look what is changed all the time. But that is another perspective. For a user of the platform it is simply annoying. We know that but not moving is not option for us so that’s why I say that frankly. And sadly the only thing that can compensate side-effects due to changes is to put a lot of man power onto it. The programming/software world has not much too say about how change should be done. 

I go back to Alan Kay's vision of a Dynabook: A personal computer for children of all ages. It should contain all its owner's  personaldata, including  his or her personal programs, as they evolve through the years.  Continuity is a must; the owner shall never loose data. 

We are onto it. If you look at the way we can work, model inspect etc. it is still an wonderful tool. And it is getting better every day while breaking things here and there. I can only repeat what I said earlier. The part of your IDE that copes with language details might break the least because that is the most stable part of the pharo system. But all of the UI system will be replaced in a non-compatible way. Morphic is great but it has grown into a hugly monster. And in this century you might not survive having bitmap based graphics. It might still make perfect sense to you. Because there will be some effort put into the ability to load it into pharo at wish. But I would suspect it won’t change much from there. 
But it cannot stay because to old-fashioned and not changeable. Maybe it is missing in the Dynabook vision that is not likely that children born after 2000 still won’t too use a graphical interface designed in the 70s being unchanged. But I’m not sure if the Dynabook vision was supposed to be realized some day or just a vehicle to complain about everything.

Again, thank you for your answers. They have given invaluable contributions to my thinking.

I would have liked to say something more encouraging but ….

Norbert

--Trygve.


On 07.05.2018 14:14, Norbert Hartl wrote:

Am 07.05.2018 um 12:42 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc programs stopped working because their runtime systems had changed.
Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc compilers stopped compiling old code because the languages had changed.

If we talk about C/C++ the runtime is the operating system. Everytime I update it the linked libraries are suspect to be invalid from then. If you have in the same system update a new version of the C compiler you are doomed. You cannot link your binary with the new libs. And the new C compiler quirks about your code. So what you have then? Staying on an old C language standard? Statically link everything. Ah no that won’t work because you would have to care about all your dependencies being compilable with the new compiler. But you don’t update the compiler meaning you don’t update the operating system. It is the same as staying on pharo 3.

For Java the situation is slightly different because if you use new programming language features you can only do when switching the compiler to the new standard. There is a lot of effort that went into making the java vm recognize the language version and execute regarding that making version compatible. We are in sync here. I told you it is about manpower. Do you know how much manpower it needed and how long it took to add something like closures to the java language? Do you consider java closure to be en par with other languages?

We are sorry not everything is to your liking. It is not even to our own liking because we have dreams far beyond. But we will never get there if we don’t take the effort. And the point of open source (did I mention pharo is open source?? ) is that the ones that do it decide what to do. Nuff said!

Norbert

On 07.05.2018 11:57, Norbert Hartl wrote:
I understand what you are saying but it contains some misconceptions about the modern software world. 

„The earth is not stopping to turn just because you want to stay on the sunny side“

There is two funny concepts going on in the modern software industry. The one tells you that because you want to do a product everything else around you should come to a full stop so can comfortably build your software not disturbed by other things. The second one tells you that you _have to upgrade_ … there is this magical force preventing you from staying where you are. Both notions are funny alone but they come combined and then they turn out to be a non-sensical monster.

Let’s take a different approach. Put in everything you say about software, libraries, etc the word version. So you can build upon Pharo version 3 your own product. You can stay at that version and it won’t change. If the software you sell is not 80% pharo but your own you should not have a problem just to stay on that version because you develop your own stuff. But still the world did not stop turning and there is pharo 4. You decide there are a few nice features but the work to adjust is too big to take the risk. Then there is pharo 5 and you … nahhh not this time….Then there is pharo6 and they not only changed the image but also the way source code is managed. That prevents you further from adjusting. But hey you can still be happy with pharo3 and it does not change. 

So what is the real problem? Yes, money/time is not enough. I think there are a lot of people risking their health to promote pharo and now we have a consortium that can pay engineers to do work on pharo. So let me tell you a future story:

You see what pharo is doing and you think it is good. You can also see that there are too less resources to proceed in the way you need it to go. So you decide to show pharo to the world inspiring people with some kind of a vision. The result is that more people pay into the consortium and we hire more engineers. And then one day the consortium has enough money to pay engineers that can care about a LTS (long term support) version of pharo. So you can stay on pharo version 3 and still get those annoying bugs fixed. And hey this team has also enough time to provide you with tools that make a migration to pharo version 4 more easy and less annoying for you. And then you have your own product based on pharo version 4. And then for version 5, version 6,…. Sounds like a dream…but hey…it is indeed realistic. It just depends on how the people approach it

How does this sound?

Norbert

Am 07.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

Thanks for your quick answer.  I have only a fleeting knowledge of Pharo but liked what I saw. The Squeak class library has seen organic growth since 1978 or earlier. Pharo gave it a thorough overhaul. At the Pharo kernel was a minimal image with a minimal class library. The rest of the functionality was partitioned into packages that could be added to the kernel image as required. Beautiful. But only my dream?
Matthew 7:24-27: And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that  house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And  everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand."
I am developing an IDE for non-programmers  called BabyIDE, a non-intrusive extension of Squeak. Where the Class Browser in Squeak is used to work with one class at the time, the BabyIDE browser is used to work with structures of collaborating objects, ignoring their classes. I would like to develop a BabyIDE image that gets broad usage and long life. I'm looking for a rock to build on and hoped it could be what I thought was the Pharo kernel+ a few selected packages. In your answer, I read that if I build BabyIDE on Pharo, I will be building on sand.

pharo.org writes: "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language...".  The only language I can see is defined by the release image. A Pharo programmer builds application programs in this language. He or she can add new classes, change existing ones, subclass them, add or change methods, change the Smalltalk dictionary, etc. etc.  An extremely flexible and powerful language.

A tale from the future when Pharo is a mainstream language: Business customers benefit from end users using applications that are written by Pharo programmers who built on the Pharo language and environment that had been developed by the Pharo community. One day there is a happy announcement: A new version of Pharo will be launched tomorrow. It is truly cool and includes any number of improvements, some of them documented. And, by the way, applications written in the current Pharo will no longer work. So please inform your customers that you will not be able to serve them for a while. We are confident that all your application programmers will be happy to drop whatever they are doing in order to adapt their applications to the new Pharo so that you can start serving your customers again.

Cheers
--Trygve
 


On 06.05.2018 13:00, Norbert Hartl wrote:
Can you elaborate on what you consider as a kernel? There are always things moving in the pharo world. The last years the virtual machine got some iterations and it is still not fully stable. For pharo it is hard to have it stable because we feel the need that a lot of the existing parts need to be replaced to be useful in these times. Furthermore pharo is also prototyping platform for programming language features. All of these are counter-stability measures. So if you need a stable kernel from native ground up to UI pharo won‘t be that thing you are looking for the coming years (if at all). You always need to adopt to change so you need to define your required scope better in order to get an estimate.

Norbert

Am 06.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it.  I have now frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can build on.  According to Stephan, this is not so. Is there any plan for creating a stable Pharo kernel that people can use for building software of lasting value for millions of non-expert users? 
--Thanks, Trygve

On 05.05.2018 13:53, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
I’ve taken a look at what would be needed to
support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it
professionally on squeak and has not enough capacity to keep up with
changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it. Twice a year
or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there are
no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep implementation
specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a lot
of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on
pharo last

Stephan

--
-- 
The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal. 
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27 

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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

Tudor Girba-2
Hi,

First, I concur with what Norbert said.

@Trygve: Could you describe what you would need in more details?

Cheers,
Doru


> On May 8, 2018, at 9:57 AM, Norbert Hartl <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
>
>> Am 08.05.2018 um 08:30 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:
>>
>> Norbert,
>> I stand corrected because I have not followed the mainstream languages as well as I probably should. Thank you for your candid answer, it clearly outlines what I can and cannot expect from Pharo and any other ST project.
>>
> Ok, I didn’t want to sound too harsh but for me there is no benefit in telling something which is not true. And as a member of such community you get sometimes allergic to things that sound negative because that happens far too often. What I said about not upgrading is the thing we suffer from. While you find it that squeak has moved too fast we consider it that it didn’t move enough. That is why a lot of the sub-systems need to be replaced and that causes instability. For me the stability is outstanding if I look what is changed all the time. But that is another perspective. For a user of the platform it is simply annoying. We know that but not moving is not option for us so that’s why I say that frankly. And sadly the only thing that can compensate side-effects due to changes is to put a lot of man power onto it. The programming/software world has not much too say about how change should be done.
>
>> I go back to Alan Kay's vision of a Dynabook: A personal computer for children of all ages. It should contain all its owner's  personaldata, including  his or her personal programs, as they evolve through the years.  Continuity is a must; the owner shall never loose data.
>>
> We are onto it. If you look at the way we can work, model inspect etc. it is still an wonderful tool. And it is getting better every day while breaking things here and there. I can only repeat what I said earlier. The part of your IDE that copes with language details might break the least because that is the most stable part of the pharo system. But all of the UI system will be replaced in a non-compatible way. Morphic is great but it has grown into a hugly monster. And in this century you might not survive having bitmap based graphics. It might still make perfect sense to you. Because there will be some effort put into the ability to load it into pharo at wish. But I would suspect it won’t change much from there.
> But it cannot stay because to old-fashioned and not changeable. Maybe it is missing in the Dynabook vision that is not likely that children born after 2000 still won’t too use a graphical interface designed in the 70s being unchanged. But I’m not sure if the Dynabook vision was supposed to be realized some day or just a vehicle to complain about everything.
>
>> Again, thank you for your answers. They have given invaluable contributions to my thinking.
>
> I would have liked to say something more encouraging but ….
>
> Norbert
>
>> --Trygve.
>>
>>
>> On 07.05.2018 14:14, Norbert Hartl wrote:
>>>
>>>> Am 07.05.2018 um 12:42 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:
>>>>
>>>> Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc programs stopped working because their runtime systems had changed.
>>>> Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc compilers stopped compiling old code because the languages had changed.
>>>>
>>> If we talk about C/C++ the runtime is the operating system. Everytime I update it the linked libraries are suspect to be invalid from then. If you have in the same system update a new version of the C compiler you are doomed. You cannot link your binary with the new libs. And the new C compiler quirks about your code. So what you have then? Staying on an old C language standard? Statically link everything. Ah no that won’t work because you would have to care about all your dependencies being compilable with the new compiler. But you don’t update the compiler meaning you don’t update the operating system. It is the same as staying on pharo 3.
>>>
>>> For Java the situation is slightly different because if you use new programming language features you can only do when switching the compiler to the new standard. There is a lot of effort that went into making the java vm recognize the language version and execute regarding that making version compatible. We are in sync here. I told you it is about manpower. Do you know how much manpower it needed and how long it took to add something like closures to the java language? Do you consider java closure to be en par with other languages?
>>>
>>> We are sorry not everything is to your liking. It is not even to our own liking because we have dreams far beyond. But we will never get there if we don’t take the effort. And the point of open source (did I mention pharo is open source?? ) is that the ones that do it decide what to do. Nuff said!
>>>
>>> Norbert
>>>
>>>> On 07.05.2018 11:57, Norbert Hartl wrote:
>>>>> I understand what you are saying but it contains some misconceptions about the modern software world.
>>>>>
>>>>> „The earth is not stopping to turn just because you want to stay on the sunny side“
>>>>>
>>>>> There is two funny concepts going on in the modern software industry. The one tells you that because you want to do a product everything else around you should come to a full stop so can comfortably build your software not disturbed by other things. The second one tells you that you _have to upgrade_ … there is this magical force preventing you from staying where you are. Both notions are funny alone but they come combined and then they turn out to be a non-sensical monster.
>>>>>
>>>>> Let’s take a different approach. Put in everything you say about software, libraries, etc the word version. So you can build upon Pharo version 3 your own product. You can stay at that version and it won’t change. If the software you sell is not 80% pharo but your own you should not have a problem just to stay on that version because you develop your own stuff. But still the world did not stop turning and there is pharo 4. You decide there are a few nice features but the work to adjust is too big to take the risk. Then there is pharo 5 and you … nahhh not this time….Then there is pharo6 and they not only changed the image but also the way source code is managed. That prevents you further from adjusting. But hey you can still be happy with pharo3 and it does not change.
>>>>>
>>>>> So what is the real problem? Yes, money/time is not enough. I think there are a lot of people risking their health to promote pharo and now we have a consortium that can pay engineers to do work on pharo. So let me tell you a future story:
>>>>>
>>>>> You see what pharo is doing and you think it is good. You can also see that there are too less resources to proceed in the way you need it to go. So you decide to show pharo to the world inspiring people with some kind of a vision. The result is that more people pay into the consortium and we hire more engineers. And then one day the consortium has enough money to pay engineers that can care about a LTS (long term support) version of pharo. So you can stay on pharo version 3 and still get those annoying bugs fixed. And hey this team has also enough time to provide you with tools that make a migration to pharo version 4 more easy and less annoying for you. And then you have your own product based on pharo version 4. And then for version 5, version 6,…. Sounds like a dream…but hey…it is indeed realistic. It just depends on how the people approach it
>>>>>
>>>>> How does this sound?
>>>>>
>>>>> Norbert
>>>>>
>>>>>> Am 07.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thanks for your quick answer.  I have only a fleeting knowledge of Pharo but liked what I saw. The Squeak class library has seen organic growth since 1978 or earlier. Pharo gave it a thorough overhaul. At the Pharo kernel was a minimal image with a minimal class library. The rest of the functionality was partitioned into packages that could be added to the kernel image as required. Beautiful. But only my dream?
>>>>>> Matthew 7:24-27: And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that  house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And  everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand."
>>>>>> I am developing an IDE for non-programmers  called BabyIDE, a non-intrusive extension of Squeak. Where the Class Browser in Squeak is used to work with one class at the time, the BabyIDE browser is used to work with structures of collaborating objects, ignoring their classes. I would like to develop a BabyIDE image that gets broad usage and long life. I'm looking for a rock to build on and hoped it could be what I thought was the Pharo kernel+ a few selected packages. In your answer, I read that if I build BabyIDE on Pharo, I will be building on sand.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> pharo.org writes: "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language...".  The only language I can see is defined by the release image. A Pharo programmer builds application programs in this language. He or she can add new classes, change existing ones, subclass them, add or change methods, change the Smalltalk dictionary, etc. etc.  An extremely flexible and powerful language.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A tale from the future when Pharo is a mainstream language: Business customers benefit from end users using applications that are written by Pharo programmers who built on the Pharo language and environment that had been developed by the Pharo community. One day there is a happy announcement: A new version of Pharo will be launched tomorrow. It is truly cool and includes any number of improvements, some of them documented. And, by the way, applications written in the current Pharo will no longer work. So please inform your customers that you will not be able to serve them for a while. We are confident that all your application programmers will be happy to drop whatever they are doing in order to adapt their applications to the new Pharo so that you can start serving your customers again.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Cheers
>>>>>> --Trygve
>>>>>>  
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 06.05.2018 13:00, Norbert Hartl wrote:
>>>>>>> Can you elaborate on what you consider as a kernel? There are always things moving in the pharo world. The last years the virtual machine got some iterations and it is still not fully stable. For pharo it is hard to have it stable because we feel the need that a lot of the existing parts need to be replaced to be useful in these times. Furthermore pharo is also prototyping platform for programming language features. All of these are counter-stability measures. So if you need a stable kernel from native ground up to UI pharo won‘t be that thing you are looking for the coming years (if at all). You always need to adopt to change so you need to define your required scope better in order to get an estimate.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Norbert
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Am 06.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it.  I have now frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can build on.  According to Stephan, this is not so. Is there any plan for creating a stable Pharo kernel that people can use for building software of lasting value for millions of non-expert users?
>>>>>>>> --Thanks, Trygve
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On 05.05.2018 13:53, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
>>>>>>>>> I’ve taken a look at what would be needed to
>>>>>>>>> support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it
>>>>>>>>> professionally on squeak and
>>>>>>>>> has not enough capacity to keep up with
>>>>>>>>> changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it.
>>>>>>>>>  Twice a year
>>>>>>>>> or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there are
>>>>>>>>> no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep implementation
>>>>>>>>> specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a lot
>>>>>>>>> of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on
>>>>>>>>> pharo last
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Stephan
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> --
>> --
>> The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal.
>> Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: [hidden email]
>> Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
>> N-0378 Oslo             http://fullOO.info
>> Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
>

--
www.tudorgirba.com
www.feenk.com

"Obvious things are difficult to teach."





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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

kilon.alios
In reply to this post by Trygve

On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 1:43 PM Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]> wrote:
Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc programs stopped working because their runtime systems had changed.
Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc compilers stopped compiling old code because the languages had changed.

1) C and C++ do not have runtime systems, only Java has. The closest to C with a runtime system is C# that has .NET. 
2) Pharo does not have a runtime system, it has a live coding enviroment which goes far beyond the demands of a runtime system which is usually compiler + intepreter + VM + standard library.
3) Pharo language changes even less often than C/C++ and Java. Even though C/C++ and Java are too afraid to change because of the panic they will cause to millions of developers too busy maintaining ugly highly unstable code that those languages are so prone at. Pharo language changes even less mainly because its far less minimal , you only need 6 lines of code to describe the entire syntax the rest is implemented as libraries which also rarely change as well. 

99.9% of Pharo issues/bugs are IDE related or some advanced software development tool and new library that goes far beyond the scope of the language and its "standard" library.

So technically speaking if we were to compared Pharo with C/C++ and Java on equal grounds as languages , plus stanard library , plus vm etc , Pharo is stellar they are a big pile of mess which is rapidly replaced by dynamic languages. 

It was just 2 decades ago when C++ was the undisputed king of software development and using another language besides VB was seen as nothing less than insane. Nowdays people have long abandoned ship and VB is seen as nothing more than an abomination.

Its ironic you mentioned Java because Java exist for one thing and one thing only , to kill C++. Did not manage to succeed but it did manage to steal away half of the developers on the premise alone that Java is far less likely to create unstable code than C/C++.   

The irony of course did not stop there and pretty much every modern dynamic language (modern static languages are an extremely rare breed in comparison) use the same argument or far more stable , much easier to debug and maintaine code. 

I have coded in Pharo for 6 years and nowdays I daily deal with C++ (mainly because of graphics code through OpenGL, Cuda etc) and I can tell you stability wise there is not even a comparison. Sure the language and its library can be stable but what use is that to me when the code is so prone to creating a ton of problem I have to ellude with the acrobatic skills of spiderman ?

Pharo is far from perfect, if it was I would still be coding in it but none the less, stability it definetly one of its main problems. Everything crash and burns at some point and frankly Pharo does it far more elegantly than any other language I have ever used and far less so.  
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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

kilon.alios
correction I mean to say
"Pharo is far from perfect, if it was I would still be coding in it but none the less, stability is definetly NOT one of its main problems."

On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 2:37 PM Dimitris Chloupis <[hidden email]> wrote:
On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 1:43 PM Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]> wrote:
Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc programs stopped working because their runtime systems had changed.
Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc compilers stopped compiling old code because the languages had changed.

1) C and C++ do not have runtime systems, only Java has. The closest to C with a runtime system is C# that has .NET. 
2) Pharo does not have a runtime system, it has a live coding enviroment which goes far beyond the demands of a runtime system which is usually compiler + intepreter + VM + standard library.
3) Pharo language changes even less often than C/C++ and Java. Even though C/C++ and Java are too afraid to change because of the panic they will cause to millions of developers too busy maintaining ugly highly unstable code that those languages are so prone at. Pharo language changes even less mainly because its far less minimal , you only need 6 lines of code to describe the entire syntax the rest is implemented as libraries which also rarely change as well. 

99.9% of Pharo issues/bugs are IDE related or some advanced software development tool and new library that goes far beyond the scope of the language and its "standard" library.

So technically speaking if we were to compared Pharo with C/C++ and Java on equal grounds as languages , plus stanard library , plus vm etc , Pharo is stellar they are a big pile of mess which is rapidly replaced by dynamic languages. 

It was just 2 decades ago when C++ was the undisputed king of software development and using another language besides VB was seen as nothing less than insane. Nowdays people have long abandoned ship and VB is seen as nothing more than an abomination.

Its ironic you mentioned Java because Java exist for one thing and one thing only , to kill C++. Did not manage to succeed but it did manage to steal away half of the developers on the premise alone that Java is far less likely to create unstable code than C/C++.   

The irony of course did not stop there and pretty much every modern dynamic language (modern static languages are an extremely rare breed in comparison) use the same argument or far more stable , much easier to debug and maintaine code. 

I have coded in Pharo for 6 years and nowdays I daily deal with C++ (mainly because of graphics code through OpenGL, Cuda etc) and I can tell you stability wise there is not even a comparison. Sure the language and its library can be stable but what use is that to me when the code is so prone to creating a ton of problem I have to ellude with the acrobatic skills of spiderman ?

Pharo is far from perfect, if it was I would still be coding in it but none the less, stability it definetly one of its main problems. Everything crash and burns at some point and frankly Pharo does it far more elegantly than any other language I have ever used and far less so.  
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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

Trygve
In reply to this post by NorbertHartl
Hi Norbert,
This discussion has been very useful to me. Let me stress that I am not criticizing Pharo. I think Pharo is an exciting and promising project.  But I  have set requirements for PP that Pharo can't fill. I have no idea how to fill them or if they can be filled at all. So here is a new research project that I look forward to digging into as soon as time permits.

Thanks
-Trygve

On 08.05.2018 09:57, Norbert Hartl wrote:


Am 08.05.2018 um 08:30 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

Norbert,
I stand corrected because I have not followed the mainstream languages as well as I probably should. Thank you for your candid answer, it clearly outlines what I can and cannot expect from Pharo and any other ST project. 

Ok, I didn’t want to sound too harsh but for me there is no benefit in telling something which is not true. And as a member of such community you get sometimes allergic to things that sound negative because that happens far too often. What I said about not upgrading is the thing we suffer from. While you find it that squeak has moved too fast we consider it that it didn’t move enough. That is why a lot of the sub-systems need to be replaced and that causes instability. For me the stability is outstanding if I look what is changed all the time. But that is another perspective. For a user of the platform it is simply annoying. We know that but not moving is not option for us so that’s why I say that frankly. And sadly the only thing that can compensate side-effects due to changes is to put a lot of man power onto it. The programming/software world has not much too say about how change should be done. 

I go back to Alan Kay's vision of a Dynabook: A personal computer for children of all ages. It should contain all its owner's  personaldata, including  his or her personal programs, as they evolve through the years.  Continuity is a must; the owner shall never loose data. 

We are onto it. If you look at the way we can work, model inspect etc. it is still an wonderful tool. And it is getting better every day while breaking things here and there. I can only repeat what I said earlier. The part of your IDE that copes with language details might break the least because that is the most stable part of the pharo system. But all of the UI system will be replaced in a non-compatible way. Morphic is great but it has grown into a hugly monster. And in this century you might not survive having bitmap based graphics. It might still make perfect sense to you. Because there will be some effort put into the ability to load it into pharo at wish. But I would suspect it won’t change much from there. 
But it cannot stay because to old-fashioned and not changeable. Maybe it is missing in the Dynabook vision that is not likely that children born after 2000 still won’t too use a graphical interface designed in the 70s being unchanged. But I’m not sure if the Dynabook vision was supposed to be realized some day or just a vehicle to complain about everything.

Again, thank you for your answers. They have given invaluable contributions to my thinking.

I would have liked to say something more encouraging but ….

Norbert

--Trygve.


On 07.05.2018 14:14, Norbert Hartl wrote:

Am 07.05.2018 um 12:42 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc programs stopped working because their runtime systems had changed.
Please tell me when Java, C, C++, etc compilers stopped compiling old code because the languages had changed.

If we talk about C/C++ the runtime is the operating system. Everytime I update it the linked libraries are suspect to be invalid from then. If you have in the same system update a new version of the C compiler you are doomed. You cannot link your binary with the new libs. And the new C compiler quirks about your code. So what you have then? Staying on an old C language standard? Statically link everything. Ah no that won’t work because you would have to care about all your dependencies being compilable with the new compiler. But you don’t update the compiler meaning you don’t update the operating system. It is the same as staying on pharo 3.

For Java the situation is slightly different because if you use new programming language features you can only do when switching the compiler to the new standard. There is a lot of effort that went into making the java vm recognize the language version and execute regarding that making version compatible. We are in sync here. I told you it is about manpower. Do you know how much manpower it needed and how long it took to add something like closures to the java language? Do you consider java closure to be en par with other languages?

We are sorry not everything is to your liking. It is not even to our own liking because we have dreams far beyond. But we will never get there if we don’t take the effort. And the point of open source (did I mention pharo is open source?? ) is that the ones that do it decide what to do. Nuff said!

Norbert

On 07.05.2018 11:57, Norbert Hartl wrote:
I understand what you are saying but it contains some misconceptions about the modern software world. 

„The earth is not stopping to turn just because you want to stay on the sunny side“

There is two funny concepts going on in the modern software industry. The one tells you that because you want to do a product everything else around you should come to a full stop so can comfortably build your software not disturbed by other things. The second one tells you that you _have to upgrade_ … there is this magical force preventing you from staying where you are. Both notions are funny alone but they come combined and then they turn out to be a non-sensical monster.

Let’s take a different approach. Put in everything you say about software, libraries, etc the word version. So you can build upon Pharo version 3 your own product. You can stay at that version and it won’t change. If the software you sell is not 80% pharo but your own you should not have a problem just to stay on that version because you develop your own stuff. But still the world did not stop turning and there is pharo 4. You decide there are a few nice features but the work to adjust is too big to take the risk. Then there is pharo 5 and you … nahhh not this time….Then there is pharo6 and they not only changed the image but also the way source code is managed. That prevents you further from adjusting. But hey you can still be happy with pharo3 and it does not change. 

So what is the real problem? Yes, money/time is not enough. I think there are a lot of people risking their health to promote pharo and now we have a consortium that can pay engineers to do work on pharo. So let me tell you a future story:

You see what pharo is doing and you think it is good. You can also see that there are too less resources to proceed in the way you need it to go. So you decide to show pharo to the world inspiring people with some kind of a vision. The result is that more people pay into the consortium and we hire more engineers. And then one day the consortium has enough money to pay engineers that can care about a LTS (long term support) version of pharo. So you can stay on pharo version 3 and still get those annoying bugs fixed. And hey this team has also enough time to provide you with tools that make a migration to pharo version 4 more easy and less annoying for you. And then you have your own product based on pharo version 4. And then for version 5, version 6,…. Sounds like a dream…but hey…it is indeed realistic. It just depends on how the people approach it

How does this sound?

Norbert

Am 07.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

Thanks for your quick answer.  I have only a fleeting knowledge of Pharo but liked what I saw. The Squeak class library has seen organic growth since 1978 or earlier. Pharo gave it a thorough overhaul. At the Pharo kernel was a minimal image with a minimal class library. The rest of the functionality was partitioned into packages that could be added to the kernel image as required. Beautiful. But only my dream?
Matthew 7:24-27: And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that  house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And  everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand."
I am developing an IDE for non-programmers  called BabyIDE, a non-intrusive extension of Squeak. Where the Class Browser in Squeak is used to work with one class at the time, the BabyIDE browser is used to work with structures of collaborating objects, ignoring their classes. I would like to develop a BabyIDE image that gets broad usage and long life. I'm looking for a rock to build on and hoped it could be what I thought was the Pharo kernel+ a few selected packages. In your answer, I read that if I build BabyIDE on Pharo, I will be building on sand.

pharo.org writes: "Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language...".  The only language I can see is defined by the release image. A Pharo programmer builds application programs in this language. He or she can add new classes, change existing ones, subclass them, add or change methods, change the Smalltalk dictionary, etc. etc.  An extremely flexible and powerful language.

A tale from the future when Pharo is a mainstream language: Business customers benefit from end users using applications that are written by Pharo programmers who built on the Pharo language and environment that had been developed by the Pharo community. One day there is a happy announcement: A new version of Pharo will be launched tomorrow. It is truly cool and includes any number of improvements, some of them documented. And, by the way, applications written in the current Pharo will no longer work. So please inform your customers that you will not be able to serve them for a while. We are confident that all your application programmers will be happy to drop whatever they are doing in order to adapt their applications to the new Pharo so that you can start serving your customers again.

Cheers
--Trygve
 


On 06.05.2018 13:00, Norbert Hartl wrote:
Can you elaborate on what you consider as a kernel? There are always things moving in the pharo world. The last years the virtual machine got some iterations and it is still not fully stable. For pharo it is hard to have it stable because we feel the need that a lot of the existing parts need to be replaced to be useful in these times. Furthermore pharo is also prototyping platform for programming language features. All of these are counter-stability measures. So if you need a stable kernel from native ground up to UI pharo won‘t be that thing you are looking for the coming years (if at all). You always need to adopt to change so you need to define your required scope better in order to get an estimate.

Norbert

Am 06.05.2018 um 11:31 schrieb Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]>:

I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it.  I have now frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can build on.  According to Stephan, this is not so. Is there any plan for creating a stable Pharo kernel that people can use for building software of lasting value for millions of non-expert users? 
--Thanks, Trygve

On 05.05.2018 13:53, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
I’ve taken a look at what would be needed to
support magma on pharo a few years ago. Chris always told us he uses it
professionally on squeak and has not enough capacity to keep up with
changes in pharo without having a customer/maintainer for it. Twice a year
or so someone asks about magma on pharo and takes a look. AFAIK there are
no real obstacles to a port, but magma uses a lot of deep implementation
specifics that will take an experienced smalltalker to deal with, and a lot
of mailing list archeology as pharo changed a lot since magma worked on
pharo last

Stephan

--
-- 
The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal. 
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27 


--

The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal.
Trygve Reenskaug      
[hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       
http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             
http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27

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Re: Personal Programming onPharo

Marcus Denker-4
In reply to this post by NorbertHartl


I go back to Alan Kay's vision of a Dynabook: A personal computer for children of all ages. It should contain all its owner's  personaldata, including  his or her personal programs, as they evolve through the years.  Continuity is a must; the owner shall never loose data. 



Do you really expect that the dynabook will be 100% backward compatible to Smalltalk-80? 

Marcus
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