The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Karl Ramberg

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 7:50 PM, Colin Putney <[hidden email]> wrote:


On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 6:30 AM, Frank Shearar <[hidden email]> wrote:

There's definitely a pattern there: someone has a great idea for a
fairly advanced capability, heroically tries to do all the work solo,
or with minimal help from the community, burns out and the work never
gets finished.
 
Traits, or things close enough to traits that you end up splitting
hairs to tell them apart, are a core feature of so many languages
nowadays (Ruby, Newspeak, Scala, Perl 6, Rust, off the top of my
head), while we let the idea die on the vine, for want of tooling
support. And I'm sure Environments will, too.

Sure, if it's not providing value, and no one's willing to do the
work, just kill the thing and be done. I'd rather see people pitch in
and help _make_ the dang thing a proper part of the system. ("Thing"
here applies mostly to Environments, but Islands and Traits too.) But
I'm also not going to run around pointing fingers: I'm too burned out
to do anything to help, so I'll just shut up now.
 
Yup, that about sums it up. 

Over the last year or so, I've attempted to resume work on Environments several times only to get discouraged and give up. The "easy" part is done, and what remains is tracing through gnarly legacy code and figuring out where the SystemDictionary assumptions are. It's hard. 

The reason I started working on OmniBrowser 10 years ago was because Nathanael Schärli commented that the hardest part of getting the Traits prototype working was adding tool support. The idea was to make a modular tool set that could easily be modified and *make language improvements easier*. That failed. OB ended up being a great IDE once Lukas did the refactoring support, but nobody uses it. I spent years trying to hunt down the underlying reasons for that and remove the obstacles, but in the end, "not exactly like the tools I already know" and "requires installation" proved insurmountable.

This is why I wanted to develop Environments in the trunk and not have it be an optional thing. That worked fairly well, but then I ran into the exact same problem that Nathanael did with Traits. 

I really want Environments to succeed. I do. I wrote the cleanest code I could, with tests and comments. I engaged with the community from the beginning and throughout the process trying to build support for the idea and knowledge about the implementation. Eventually, I had to take a break and deal with meatspace things like moving and a new job, but I was determined to get back into it as soon as I could.

After time away from it, though, thinking about Environments fills me with despair. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to make Squeak better. The only thing the Squeak community values is compatibility with Alan's demos, and a version of Etoys that nobody uses. Ok, that's over the top. But to a first approximation it's true. It's why we lost the Pharo folks.

So here's my proposal: let's decide as a community whether we want Environments or not. I pledge to help implement the decision either way. If people want to go back to the classical ST-80 global namespace, I'll help with that. Or we can figure out what would be required for Environments to actually be worth keeping and I'll help work on that too. 

Thoughts?

Colin


Well, if you are interested in working on it I salute you. 
I understand your frustration. Squeak is a ship with many captains. It takes patience and skill to change course. Many have left this community in frustration.

I will help you where I can with this project.
But most of the stuff involved are much above my knowledge. 

Anyway, I committed workaround you had suggested to a issue with environments the other day :-)

Best,
Karl


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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

timrowledge
In reply to this post by Colin Putney-3
Doing anything  big is a pain, even if you’re being paid to do it, have assigned colleagues that you can direct, and know what you’re doing. Most companies fail miserably at it.

In an open source project you add an entire galaxy of extra pain. Herding cats doesn’t even begin to cover it; if you have a decent group of fans of your idea(s) you still face the problems of lack of time, other interests, arguments and on and on. It is a perfect example why the fantasy of ‘the free market will solve everything!’ is so fatuous.

Traits; I liked the idea, as I said. But I’ve never felt the lack of them, nor worked on anything where I thought “hhmm, a trait would be useful here” and with no support in any tools nor easily accessible documentation that might lead me to a fuller appreciation etc... forget it. The only response we’ve had to  offer any idea why we ought to care was Marcel saying he found them a bit useful for documenting something. That isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

There is a modestly informative page on the swiki at http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/538 but it dates back to 2006! The commentary in-image is dismal (as is pretty standard, to our disgrace) and offers nothing I can spot that could encourage me to use them, let alone any pointers on how. There’s nothing I can see to indicate Traits actually being used in-image so there’s nothing that makes me think it worth digging further. The only Trait stuff I can find is in fact in the 311Deprecated-Traits category. 3.11 was quite a while ago. Oh, wait, there is a set of tests that might explain something *if they were damn well documented*

Islands; I can’t find anything about them. The swiki has a few pages of approximately 0 information content. In fact it doesn’t seem like they’re even in the image, so I have no idea.

Environments: I like the idea of namespaces that help avoid class/ivar/message name clashes. I don’t see any info to help me make use of them, or when it might be useful, or how to find them. I see very few comments in code, virtually none for classes, nothing in the tests. Haven’t been able to spot any swiki info either.

Universes; I can’t even see enough info to gain an idea of what they’re for! The only bit I spotted points to stuff on a server that no longer exists and probably hasn’t since ’06.

The software world in general seems to be useless at this; we’re nothing special. There are people out there that think running some parser over a tree of text files and extracting function comments is an adequate way to create a manual! There are others that will claim that the ‘code is self documenting’ which really ought to be a capital crime.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful Latin Phrases:- Nullo metro compositum est = It doesn't rhyme.



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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Karl Ramberg
In reply to this post by commits-2


On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 10:07 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
Doing anything  big is a pain, even if you’re being paid to do it, have assigned colleagues that you can direct, and know what you’re doing. Most companies fail miserably at it.

In an open source project you add an entire galaxy of extra pain. Herding cats doesn’t even begin to cover it; if you have a decent group of fans of your idea(s) you still face the problems of lack of time, other interests, arguments and on and on. It is a perfect example why the fantasy of ‘the free market will solve everything!’ is so fatuous.

Traits; I liked the idea, as I said. But I’ve never felt the lack of them, nor worked on anything where I thought “hhmm, a trait would be useful here” and with no support in any tools nor easily accessible documentation that might lead me to a fuller appreciation etc... forget it. The only response we’ve had to  offer any idea why we ought to care was Marcel saying he found them a bit useful for documenting something. That isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

There is a modestly informative page on the swiki at http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/538 but it dates back to 2006! The commentary in-image is dismal (as is pretty standard, to our disgrace) and offers nothing I can spot that could encourage me to use them, let alone any pointers on how. There’s nothing I can see to indicate Traits actually being used in-image so there’s nothing that makes me think it worth digging further. The only Trait stuff I can find is in fact in the 311Deprecated-Traits category. 3.11 was quite a while ago. Oh, wait, there is a set of tests that might explain something *if they were damn well documented*

Never used traits either. 

Islands; I can’t find anything about them. The swiki has a few pages of approximately 0 information content. In fact it doesn’t seem like they’re even in the image, so I have no idea.

Not used this.

Environments: I like the idea of namespaces that help avoid class/ivar/message name clashes. I don’t see any info to help me make use of them, or when it might be useful, or how to find them. I see very few comments in code, virtually none for classes, nothing in the tests. Haven’t been able to spot any swiki info either.

I have looked at the code, but not really understood it. 

Universes; I can’t even see enough info to gain an idea of what they’re for! The only bit I spotted points to stuff on a server that no longer exists and probably hasn’t since ’06.

Universes was a SquakMap kind of tool, but since there is no server running, it's pretty useless.  

The software world in general seems to be useless at this; we’re nothing special. There are people out there that think running some parser over a tree of text files and extracting function comments is an adequate way to create a manual! There are others that will claim that the ‘code is self documenting’ which really ought to be a capital crime.

You can always doIt HelpBrowser openOn: aClass which will bring up all class and method comments for that class. 
By the way, that should be added to the browser class pane menu...

Best,
Karl

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful Latin Phrases:- Nullo metro compositum est = It doesn't rhyme.






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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

David T. Lewis
In reply to this post by Colin Putney-3
On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 10:50:26AM -0800, Colin Putney wrote:

>
> So here's my proposal: let's decide as a community whether we want
> Environments or not. I pledge to help implement the decision either way. If
> people want to go back to the classical ST-80 global namespace, I'll help
> with that. Or we can figure out what would be required for Environments to
> actually be worth keeping and I'll help work on that too.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Colin

I strongly favor keeping Environments in the image and doing whatever is
needed to address issues that are currently blocking use of image segments
(or whatever other real or perceived problems we may have).

My opinion is based in no small part on Andreas Raab's assessment that
Environments is a difficult job done right. I am no expert in this area,
but I trust Andreas' judgement a lot in matters like this. A good, elegant
solution to a difficult problem is worth the effort to bring to completion,
even if it takes us a few years to get it done. Let's stick with it and
make it right.

Dave


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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Eliot Miranda-2
In reply to this post by Colin Putney-3
I want Environments and I want Traits too.  You say "Nobody cares. Nobody wants to make Squeak better. The only thing the Squeak community values is compatibility with Alan's demos, and a version of Etoys that nobody uses.".  None of those statements are true of my efforts or, as far as I can see, of the significant efforts of the HPI team, or of Tim Rowledge, if Chris Muller or Levente Uzoni, and probably a lot of other folks too.

Squeak is my day to day workhorse.  The HOI folks are improving the environment at great velocity.  Squeak 5 is ~40% faster than Squeak 4.6.  Neither of these things are true because no one cares. Colin, mon brave!  Mon pôte.  Despair not!

_,,,^..^,,,_ (phone)

On Nov 23, 2015, at 10:50 AM, Colin Putney <[hidden email]> wrote:



On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 6:30 AM, Frank Shearar <[hidden email]> wrote:

There's definitely a pattern there: someone has a great idea for a
fairly advanced capability, heroically tries to do all the work solo,
or with minimal help from the community, burns out and the work never
gets finished.
 
Traits, or things close enough to traits that you end up splitting
hairs to tell them apart, are a core feature of so many languages
nowadays (Ruby, Newspeak, Scala, Perl 6, Rust, off the top of my
head), while we let the idea die on the vine, for want of tooling
support. And I'm sure Environments will, too.

Sure, if it's not providing value, and no one's willing to do the
work, just kill the thing and be done. I'd rather see people pitch in
and help _make_ the dang thing a proper part of the system. ("Thing"
here applies mostly to Environments, but Islands and Traits too.) But
I'm also not going to run around pointing fingers: I'm too burned out
to do anything to help, so I'll just shut up now.
 
Yup, that about sums it up. 

Over the last year or so, I've attempted to resume work on Environments several times only to get discouraged and give up. The "easy" part is done, and what remains is tracing through gnarly legacy code and figuring out where the SystemDictionary assumptions are. It's hard. 

The reason I started working on OmniBrowser 10 years ago was because Nathanael Schärli commented that the hardest part of getting the Traits prototype working was adding tool support. The idea was to make a modular tool set that could easily be modified and *make language improvements easier*. That failed. OB ended up being a great IDE once Lukas did the refactoring support, but nobody uses it. I spent years trying to hunt down the underlying reasons for that and remove the obstacles, but in the end, "not exactly like the tools I already know" and "requires installation" proved insurmountable.

This is why I wanted to develop Environments in the trunk and not have it be an optional thing. That worked fairly well, but then I ran into the exact same problem that Nathanael did with Traits. 

I really want Environments to succeed. I do. I wrote the cleanest code I could, with tests and comments. I engaged with the community from the beginning and throughout the process trying to build support for the idea and knowledge about the implementation. Eventually, I had to take a break and deal with meatspace things like moving and a new job, but I was determined to get back into it as soon as I could.

After time away from it, though, thinking about Environments fills me with despair. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to make Squeak better. The only thing the Squeak community values is compatibility with Alan's demos, and a version of Etoys that nobody uses. Ok, that's over the top. But to a first approximation it's true. It's why we lost the Pharo folks.

So here's my proposal: let's decide as a community whether we want Environments or not. I pledge to help implement the decision either way. If people want to go back to the classical ST-80 global namespace, I'll help with that. Or we can figure out what would be required for Environments to actually be worth keeping and I'll help work on that too. 

Thoughts?

Colin



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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Colin Putney-3


On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Eliot Miranda <[hidden email]> wrote:
I want Environments and I want Traits too.  You say "Nobody cares. Nobody wants to make Squeak better. The only thing the Squeak community values is compatibility with Alan's demos, and a version of Etoys that nobody uses.".  None of those statements are true of my efforts or, as far as I can see, of the significant efforts of the HPI team, or of Tim Rowledge, if Chris Muller or Levente Uzoni, and probably a lot of other folks too.

Squeak is my day to day workhorse.  The HOI folks are improving the environment at great velocity.  Squeak 5 is ~40% faster than Squeak 4.6.  Neither of these things are true because no one cares. Colin, mon brave!  Mon pôte.  Despair not!

Well, I did admit that it was over the top. :-)

I do think Frank had a point, though. Squeak has had many ambitious projects over the years, but they all die because one person can't sustain the necessary effort for the time it takes to get it done, and the community can't pick up the slack. We've got to get better at this.

I'll poke around over the holidays and make a list of Environments issues. Then we can figure out how to tackle them. 

Colin


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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

marcel.taeumel
For the sake of maintainability, we should keep them in Trunk, make them unloadable and configure our CI environment to execute all tests *after* unloading them.

We could/should do so for other packages as well. It is not only about having a minimal base system were things can be loaded but about a base system that represents a fair trade-off for maintenance while supporting things to be unloadable. :)

Best,
Marcel
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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Stéphane Rollandin
In reply to this post by Eliot Miranda-2
>  You say "Nobody cares.
> Nobody wants to make Squeak better. The only thing the Squeak community
> values is compatibility with Alan's demos, and a version of Etoys that
> nobody uses.".  None of those statements are true of my efforts or, as
> far as I can see, of the significant efforts of the HPI team, or of Tim
> Rowledge, if Chris Muller or Levente Uzoni, and probably a lot of other
> folks too.
>
> Squeak is my day to day workhorse.  The HOI folks are improving the
> environment at great velocity.  Squeak 5 is ~40% faster than Squeak 4.6.
>   Neither of these things are true because no one cares.

+1

And if I may add: the feeling that "nobody cares" is a permeating one.
Not many people give feedback about what they care about (me included).

In my case, I definitely have the feeling that nobody cares about
anything I ever did in Squeak during about 15 years now, which to day
includes: a modular Lisp/Scheme implementation, an extension for
functional programming, the upgrading of the Prolog implementation, a
vast system for musical composition, and a Space Invader reboot.

It's fortunate I did not do this for glory and fame :)

Even more, I still mostly feel like a complete outsider (probably
because I build things on top of Squeak instead of working on the core,
and possibly also because I work alone and have no position in industry
or academia).

I'm so convinced nobody cares about what I do that stopped long ago
sending fixes to bug I encounters: I just fix them in my code. For
example, the Saucers game I did has a much faster way of handling
morphs, down to modified #addMorph: logic. This could be leveraged, if
someone looked at the code. But you cannot command interest.

Well, that's how it is. I have the same experience with Csound people,
so I'm pretty sure there is nothing specific to Squeak in these matters.
The web is a cold place.


Cheers,

Stef


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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Chris Muller-3
> And if I may add: the feeling that "nobody cares" is a permeating one. Not
> many people give feedback about what they care about (me included).
>
> In my case, I definitely have the feeling that nobody cares about anything I
> ever did in Squeak during about 15 years now,

I do!  :)

> which to day includes: a
> modular Lisp/Scheme implementation, an extension for functional programming,
> the upgrading of the Prolog implementation, a vast system for musical
> composition, and a Space Invader reboot.

No, your stuff helped us tremendously when we reported our progress to
the SFC back around that time of the dismal 4.5 Release.  But I do not
always say so.  Nor do you (as you admitted, "me included").

So maybe the shortage is of compliements than caring..?  Or a shortage
of positive thinking?

> It's fortunate I did not do this for glory and fame :)

That's when people make their best stuff..

> Even more, I still mostly feel like a complete outsider (probably because I
> build things on top of Squeak instead of working on the core, and possibly
> also because I work alone and have no position in industry or academia).
>
> I'm so convinced nobody cares about what I do that stopped long ago sending
> fixes to bug I encounters: I just fix them in my code. For example, the
> Saucers game I did has a much faster way of handling morphs, down to
> modified #addMorph: logic. This could be leveraged, if someone looked at the
> code. But you cannot command interest.
>
> Well, that's how it is. I have the same experience with Csound people, so
> I'm pretty sure there is nothing specific to Squeak in these matters. The
> web is a cold place.

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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Karl Ramberg
In reply to this post by Stéphane Rollandin


On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 11:24 AM, Stéphane Rollandin <[hidden email]> wrote:
 You say "Nobody cares.
Nobody wants to make Squeak better. The only thing the Squeak community
values is compatibility with Alan's demos, and a version of Etoys that
nobody uses.".  None of those statements are true of my efforts or, as
far as I can see, of the significant efforts of the HPI team, or of Tim
Rowledge, if Chris Muller or Levente Uzoni, and probably a lot of other
folks too.

Squeak is my day to day workhorse.  The HOI folks are improving the
environment at great velocity.  Squeak 5 is ~40% faster than Squeak 4.6.
  Neither of these things are true because no one cares.

+1

And if I may add: the feeling that "nobody cares" is a permeating one. Not many people give feedback about what they care about (me included).

In my case, I definitely have the feeling that nobody cares about anything I ever did in Squeak during about 15 years now, which to day includes: a modular Lisp/Scheme implementation, an extension for functional programming, the upgrading of the Prolog implementation, a vast system for musical composition, and a Space Invader reboot.

It's fortunate I did not do this for glory and fame :)

Even more, I still mostly feel like a complete outsider (probably because I build things on top of Squeak instead of working on the core, and possibly also because I work alone and have no position in industry or academia).

I'm so convinced nobody cares about what I do that stopped long ago sending fixes to bug I encounters: I just fix them in my code. For example, the Saucers game I did has a much faster way of handling morphs, down to modified #addMorph: logic. This could be leveraged, if someone looked at the code. But you cannot command interest.

I want to look at the code for the Saucers game. The one I downloaded from you page seemed to be in a locked image and I never got around to ask how to get to the code...
So if you have it accessible I'm interested.

Best,
Kar 

Well, that's how it is. I have the same experience with Csound people, so I'm pretty sure there is nothing specific to Squeak in these matters. The web is a cold place.


Cheers,

Stef





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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Hannes Hirzel
On 11/24/15, karl ramberg <[hidden email]> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 11:24 AM, Stéphane Rollandin
> <[hidden email]
>> wrote:
>
>>  You say "Nobody cares.
>>> Nobody wants to make Squeak better. The only thing the Squeak community
>>> values is compatibility with Alan's demos, and a version of Etoys that
>>> nobody uses.".  None of those statements are true of my efforts or, as
>>> far as I can see, of the significant efforts of the HPI team, or of Tim
>>> Rowledge, if Chris Muller or Levente Uzoni, and probably a lot of other
>>> folks too.
>>>
>>> Squeak is my day to day workhorse.  The HOI folks are improving the
>>> environment at great velocity.  Squeak 5 is ~40% faster than Squeak 4.6.
>>>   Neither of these things are true because no one cares.
>>>
>>
>> +1
>>
>> And if I may add: the feeling that "nobody cares" is a permeating one.
>> Not
>> many people give feedback about what they care about (me included).
>>
>> In my case, I definitely have the feeling that nobody cares about
>> anything
>> I ever did in Squeak during about 15 years now, which to day includes: a
>> modular Lisp/Scheme implementation, an extension for functional
>> programming, the upgrading of the Prolog implementation, a vast system
>> for
>> musical composition, and a Space Invader reboot.
>>
>> It's fortunate I did not do this for glory and fame :)
>>
>> Even more, I still mostly feel like a complete outsider (probably because
>> I build things on top of Squeak instead of working on the core, and
>> possibly also because I work alone and have no position in industry or
>> academia).
>>
>> I'm so convinced nobody cares about what I do that stopped long ago
>> sending fixes to bug I encounters: I just fix them in my code. For
>> example,
>> the Saucers game I did has a much faster way of handling morphs, down to
>> modified #addMorph: logic. This could be leveraged, if someone looked at
>> the code. But you cannot command interest.
>>
>
> I want to look at the code for the Saucers game. The one I downloaded from
> you page seemed to be in a locked image and I never got around to ask how
> to get to the code...
> So if you have it accessible I'm interested.
>
> Best,
> Kar

Hello Stephane
Is it possible to make it available on SqueakMap?

--Hannes

>>
>> Well, that's how it is. I have the same experience with Csound people, so
>> I'm pretty sure there is nothing specific to Squeak in these matters. The
>> web is a cold place.
>>
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Stef
>>
>>
>>
>

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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Hannes Hirzel
In reply to this post by Chris Muller-3
On 11/21/15, Chris Muller <[hidden email]> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 12:40 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> Should we keep Traits? It was a neat idea that I was happy to support but
>> it got left unfinished. Where are tools to develop & manage Traits? Where
>> is the usage?
>>
>> Unless there is a compelling reason - and subsequent effort to fill out
>> support - I suggest we should remove them. Along with Islands. And
>> Universes. And probably Environments too, since that has stalled without
>> becoming a proper part of the system.
>
> +1.  +1.  +1 and, +1.  Doing the most with the least is the most
> beautiful and admirable aspect of Squeak.  Six reserved words,
> assignment, and sending messages to objects.  That's pretty much it.
> Those concepts alone form the building blocks of the entire IDE, and
> still able to push the language with clever hacks like Mixins,
> Generators, Promises, Futures, WriteBarriers, and Continuations.
>
> Traits, Slots, Islands, Environments and Pragmas never convinced me
> that they deserve to be part of a language this wonderfully sparse.

+1 for removing Universes at the moment. There is no server for them
and updating SqueakMap which is done at a modest pace replaces the
need for them.

I think this has been discussed before the release of 4.6 and people
agreed but at that time it was to late to do it.

--Hannes

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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Stéphane Rollandin
In reply to this post by Chris Muller-3
> So maybe the shortage is of compliements than caring..?  Or a shortage
> of positive thinking?

Shortage of people actually using the stuff :)

Stef

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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Stéphane Rollandin
In reply to this post by Karl Ramberg
> I want to look at the code for the Saucers game. The one I downloaded
> from you page seemed to be in a locked image and I never got around to
> ask how to get to the code...
> So if you have it accessible I'm interested.

Your can get the code from a link at the bottom of the page.
Here's the link anyway:
http://www.zogotounga.net/comp/squeak/Saucers1.6.sar

Note that this is for 4.5

Best,

Stef

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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Stéphane Rollandin
In reply to this post by Hannes Hirzel
> Hello Stephane
> Is it possible to make it available on SqueakMap?

Ok, I'll do so.

Stef


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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Karl Ramberg
In reply to this post by Stéphane Rollandin
Ah, thanks :-)

Best,
Karl

On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 9:17 AM, Stéphane Rollandin <[hidden email]> wrote:
I want to look at the code for the Saucers game. The one I downloaded
from you page seemed to be in a locked image and I never got around to
ask how to get to the code...
So if you have it accessible I'm interested.

Your can get the code from a link at the bottom of the page.
Here's the link anyway:
http://www.zogotounga.net/comp/squeak/Saucers1.6.sar

Note that this is for 4.5

Best,

Stef




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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Frank Shearar-3
In reply to this post by Hannes Hirzel
On 24 November 2015 at 21:09, H. Hirzel <[hidden email]> wrote:

> On 11/21/15, Chris Muller <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 12:40 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>> Should we keep Traits? It was a neat idea that I was happy to support but
>>> it got left unfinished. Where are tools to develop & manage Traits? Where
>>> is the usage?
>>>
>>> Unless there is a compelling reason - and subsequent effort to fill out
>>> support - I suggest we should remove them. Along with Islands. And
>>> Universes. And probably Environments too, since that has stalled without
>>> becoming a proper part of the system.
>>
>> +1.  +1.  +1 and, +1.  Doing the most with the least is the most
>> beautiful and admirable aspect of Squeak.  Six reserved words,
>> assignment, and sending messages to objects.  That's pretty much it.
>> Those concepts alone form the building blocks of the entire IDE, and
>> still able to push the language with clever hacks like Mixins,
>> Generators, Promises, Futures, WriteBarriers, and Continuations.
>>
>> Traits, Slots, Islands, Environments and Pragmas never convinced me
>> that they deserve to be part of a language this wonderfully sparse.
>
> +1 for removing Universes at the moment. There is no server for them
> and updating SqueakMap which is done at a modest pace replaces the
> need for them.

I was under the impression that Universes _was removed_, like, back in
4.4 or the beginning of the 4.5 cycle, when I was up to my eyeballs in
hairy dependencies... Certainly the build processes think so -
https://github.com/squeak-smalltalk/squeak-ci/blob/master/package-load-scripts/Universes.st
is the _load script_ for Universes (implying its _unloaded by default_
state).

frank

> I think this has been discussed before the release of 4.6 and people
> agreed but at that time it was to late to do it.
>
> --Hannes
>

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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

timrowledge
In reply to this post by Stéphane Rollandin

> On 25-11-2015, at 12:13 AM, Stéphane Rollandin <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> So maybe the shortage is of compliements than caring..?  Or a shortage
>> of positive thinking?
>
> Shortage of people actually using the stuff :)

Always a problem, and especially so for open source stuff. Almost all open projects end up with a single contributor and a tiny number of users. It’s just life.

For example Stéphane’s Prolog etc - I’d never be likely to even look at it because nothing about Lisp or Prolog interests me, not being a languages geek and having had nasty experiences when I did try to make some sense of them as an impressionable youth.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: IPL: Invent Program Lines



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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Eliot Miranda-2
In reply to this post by marcel.taeumel
Hi Marcel,

> On Nov 24, 2015, at 1:12 AM, marcel.taeumel <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> For the sake of maintainability, we should keep them in Trunk, make them
> unloadable and configure our CI environment to execute all tests *after*
> unloading them.

+1. And to be clear, run the tests before and after unloading them.

> We could/should do so for other packages as well. It is not only about
> having a minimal base system were things can be loaded but about a base
> system that represents a fair trade-off for maintenance while supporting
> things to be unloadable. :)

+1.

> Best,
> Marcel
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/The-Inbox-Traits-pre-307-mcz-tp4862218p4862942.html
> Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

_,,,^..^,,,_ (phone)
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Re: The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Karl Ramberg
In reply to this post by Stéphane Rollandin


On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 11:24 AM, Stéphane Rollandin <[hidden email]> wrote:
 You say "Nobody cares.
Nobody wants to make Squeak better. The only thing the Squeak community
values is compatibility with Alan's demos, and a version of Etoys that
nobody uses.".  None of those statements are true of my efforts or, as
far as I can see, of the significant efforts of the HPI team, or of Tim
Rowledge, if Chris Muller or Levente Uzoni, and probably a lot of other
folks too.

Squeak is my day to day workhorse.  The HOI folks are improving the
environment at great velocity.  Squeak 5 is ~40% faster than Squeak 4.6.
  Neither of these things are true because no one cares.

+1

And if I may add: the feeling that "nobody cares" is a permeating one. Not many people give feedback about what they care about (me included).

In my case, I definitely have the feeling that nobody cares about anything I ever did in Squeak during about 15 years now, which to day includes: a modular Lisp/Scheme implementation, an extension for functional programming, the upgrading of the Prolog implementation, a vast system for musical composition, and a Space Invader reboot.

It's fortunate I did not do this for glory and fame :)

Even more, I still mostly feel like a complete outsider (probably because I build things on top of Squeak instead of working on the core, and possibly also because I work alone and have no position in industry or academia).

I'm so convinced nobody cares about what I do that stopped long ago sending fixes to bug I encounters: I just fix them in my code. For example, the Saucers game I did has a much faster way of handling morphs, down to modified #addMorph: logic. This could be leveraged, if someone looked at the code. But you cannot command interest.

Are you not interested becoming a core developer so you can contribute  directly to trunk ?
I would guess you are qualified, based on the stuff you have produced...

Best,
Karl

Well, that's how it is. I have the same experience with Csound people, so I'm pretty sure there is nothing specific to Squeak in these matters. The web is a cold place.


Cheers,

Stef





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