Traits or not Traits that is the question

If it wasn't for kids, nothing would change.  :-P

l8r
Sean

On 4-Feb-08, at 4:40 PM, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
Exactly. And it's about time we used unicode properly and had the  
appropriate char for our assignment. This ':=" crap is just vile. What  
is this, Pascal?

I quite like the leftwards sqiggle arrow"⇜" Unicode 21DC and RTF8 E2  
87 9C but even plain boring  ← Leftwards Arrow unicode 2190 would be  
ok. And how about ⤴ arrow pointing rightwards then curving upwards  
unicode 2934 for return?


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: WAF: Warn After the Fact

--
http://people.squeakfoundation.org/person/mikevdg
http://gulik.pbwiki.com/

Yes, yes, but the key point is: "modern meaning".

So, for the 21st century, Squeak gets underscore *wrong*.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

And for a dozen years. Every knows it is wrong. There was even a recent
discussion on it. It still can't be fixed!

Emailed Squeak source using it displays wrong in any normal client. You
can't use underscore like you can in just about every other modern
programming language, as an embedded space. Every other Smalltalk does
assign with ":=". There is no significant *benefit* to almost anybody
(especially newbies) in being different this way, only a major *cost*.

And this can be fixed by running a script with a few lines of code; I did it
myself like ten years ago (well, I think I modified a compiler node or two
too to allow underscores in variables and methods). There is a huge failure
of community process here. A huge failure of ideals in this specific way.
(Having said that, generally the Squeak community process and ideals get it
right. :-) Or in general, Squeak sometimes ignores "tune defaults for the
novice".

How many other things in Squeak reflect a similar conservative design
philosophy and just clutter up an otherwise amazing imagination amplifier
system?

Putting Squeak on Java, and splitting out the idiosyncrasies (underscore,
GUI issues, etc.) into modules makes a lot of sense to me. Squeak is so
powerful and flexible you can still have them as an expert, but why make
them defaults?

If you want to show Squeak's power, then change the default for everyone,
and let greybeards take a plain Squeak system of their own and write a few
lines of code to convert ":=" to underscore (or a Unicode backarrow) and to
change the compiler and convert the whole image. Make this code an easy
module to both add and then remove this change. Everyone else can be
suitably impressed with the power of Squeak in the hands of an expert, but
they can still all email their source code to each other in an easily
legible way. :-)

And yes, in a new Squeak, backarrow assign should be the first thing to be
removed from the default image IMHO. :-)

--Paul Fernhout

Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

tim Rowledge wrote:
> Exactly. And it's about time we used unicode properly and had the
> appropriate char for our assignment. This ':=" crap is just vile. What
> is this, Pascal?
>
> I quite like the leftwards sqiggle arrow"⇜" Unicode 21DC and RTF8 E2 87
> 9C but even plain boring  ← Leftwards Arrow unicode 2190 would be ok.
> And how about ⤴ arrow pointing rightwards then curving upwards unicode
> 2934 for return?

I like Unicode, but if you're not joking, consider how hard are Unicode
characters to type for a commonly used expression on a common keyboard?

And then at what point does Squeak start sliding into APL once you go down
that route? Arbitrary Unicode unary or binary selectors?
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)
Putting a core operator into Unicode just seems like asking for trouble to
me. Like APL, maybe *fun*, but still *trouble*. :-)

Having said that, of course great Unicode support is a must, and there is no
reason an expert could not define things to their personal liking. But do
you want to be the one writing the newbie tutorial on Squeak including a
long section on how to construct a backarrow or uparrow on an arbitrary
keyboard across all platforms? I guess you could just suggest they cut and
paste one from code somewhere or pull up a virtual keyboard or rely on auto
completion in a browser? :-)

The leading colon of ":=" actually makes a little syntactic sense in a
Smalltalk-y way; assign is kind of like a message to self, only different
(but maybe I have just looked at too many. :-)

Again, what real benefit to whom for what cost to whom of doing it
differently from every other Smalltalk as the *default*?

By the way, the last character you included did not render for me in my
email client (using Thunderbird, with a lot of fonts loaded). That should
not be the sole decider, but it is a data point on the complexity of
introducing Unicode for *core* syntax.

--Paul Fernhout

>
> By the way, the last character you included did not render for me in my
> email client (using Thunderbird, with a lot of fonts loaded). That should
> not be the sole decider, but it is a data point on the complexity of
> introducing Unicode for *core* syntax.
>
>  


And, *none* of them rendered for me.

Nevin

On 4-Feb-08, at 5:48 PM, Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
It's exactly as hard as turning any other keystroke into any other  
character in the text stream. We could use any key input from cmd-g  
(which IIRC VW used to make the assign some years ago) to alt-_ to cmd-
alt-ctl-shift-meta2-RMS  - this time to get an assign instead of the  
ascii portrait I mentioned in another thread. Personally I'd map plain  
shift-- (ie underscore) since  
underscores_have_no_place_in_variable_names. Similarly I'd use  
ordinary ^ for return on the keyboard.

I really don't care whether source is readable in non-Smalltalk  
applications any more than it annoys me that I can't read jpegs as  
text. The furthest I'd be inclined to go is to use xml as a transfer  
encoding.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Hackers have kernel knowledge.

Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
> Yes, yes, but the key point is: "modern meaning".
>
> So, for the 21st century, Squeak gets underscore *wrong*.
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
>
> And for a dozen years. Every knows it is wrong. There was even a recent
> discussion on it. It still can't be fixed!

Sure it can. Croquet fixed it.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

tim Rowledge wrote:
> It's exactly as hard as turning any other keystroke into any other
> character in the text stream. We could use any key input from cmd-g
> (which IIRC VW used to make the assign some years ago) to alt-_ to
> cmd-alt-ctl-shift-meta2-RMS  - this time to get an assign instead of the
> ascii portrait I mentioned in another thread. Personally I'd map plain
> shift-- (ie underscore) since
> underscores_have_no_place_in_variable_names. Similarly I'd use ordinary
> ^ for return on the keyboard.

OK, yes if you know something *special* and *non-obvious* you can do it.
Great for experts. But why make it the default?

> I really don't care whether source is readable in non-Smalltalk
> applications

Most of us don't have the luxury yet of living in one system. We have to
deal with multiple common standards (among the uncommon standards). ASCII is
a bottom line standard for almost everyone these days, especially with UTF-8
encompassing it.

Ask yourself this, would there be more Smalltalk jobs for experts if there
were more novice users because a Squeak successor was easier to use and talk
about and ask questions by email for newbies?  And how long does it take to
get to be an expert Smalltalker? Ten years? Twenty? So these new people
would be little threat to current expert Squeakers' livelihoods. Then, let
us conclude, like Deep Thought of Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy: "So long
as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging
each other off in the popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy
train for life." :-)

>  any more than it annoys me that I can't read jpegs as text.

That annoys me. :-)

Try XPM for bitmaps
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPM_%28image_format%29

and BDF for fonts. :-)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyph_Bitmap_Distribution_Format

> The furthest I'd be inclined to go is to use xml as a transfer encoding.

I'll repeat the classic: "You have a problem. You decide to solve it via
XML. Now you have TWO problems." :-)

I'd rather use Smalltalk source to define image files. :-) I did that in
PataPata using Python to define a world of live objects and it was pretty
neat and successful for what it did. Example:
"/tags/PataPata_v204/WorldDandelionGarden.py"
http://patapata.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/patapata/tags/PataPata_v204/WorldDandelionGarden.py?revision=315&view=markup

I went a bit to far with properties and prototypes though. And Python kind
of ran out of gas as far as edit-and-continue support.

I think you could get a Smalltalk VM to do this generically rather than via
some methods/functions I needed to add for Python. And to read in an image,
you evaluate the code.

I would suggest such a default format for a JVM Smalltalk. Disk space is
cheap these days. So is bandwidth. Even exponentially CPU power means
loading such images as the default might not be very noticeable, and how
often do people load images? And they could always be cached somehow for the
special case where it did matter. How much bigger would images really get,
especially if they were modular, with one major application per image,
perhaps referencing a shared common world of core objects, and using XPM for
defining bitmaps and BDF for defining fonts. :-)

Why shouldn't your image be a readable Smalltalk program for constructing a
world of objects?

Or to paraphrase another character or two: "Is a binary image format better,
more evolveable, stronger? No! But the binary image is easier, faster,
quicker. Write it as human readable source, Luke!"

--Paul Fernhout

On 05/02/2008, Michael van der Gulik <[hidden email]> wrote: Let's do it! Of course, if this is the only little obstacle on the way
of putting World on it's knees to bow Smalltalk :)

--
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.

>
> And yes, in a new Squeak, backarrow assign should be the first thing to be
> removed from the default image IMHO. :-)
>
> --Paul Fernhout
>
>  
Dear Paul,

you are ranting.

The reason this has not happened is that people are busy.  I have been
wanting to do this for two years and just havent had time.
Since squeak is open source, if you want something doing... you are as
much invited to improve things as anyone else is.

In the time you have spent writing your long emails you could have
tweaked the parser to enable underscores in methods and variables, AND
still have it available for assignment. Some packages like
Poststress/Gloop already make similar tweaks.

Since you care about it so much, I look forward to seeing what you come
up with

cheers

Keith
 

Andreas Raab wrote:
> Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
>> So, for the 21st century, Squeak gets underscore *wrong*.
>>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
>>
>> And for a dozen years. Every knows it is wrong. There was even a recent
>> discussion on it. It still can't be fixed!
>
> Sure it can. Croquet fixed it.

That's exactly my point. :-) Why only Croquet (or some other images)? And
how does that help the average Squeaker tracking the main distribution?
Something is broken here. Endless repetition of core work. Lost code.
Unexpected gotchas. Unpleasant surprises for newbies. A core syntax leaving
most of the community with trouble communicating by common standards (email,
IRC, Web pages). In short, this is another example of a decade-long failure
of defining modularity and taming complexity and tuning defaults to the
novice and accommodating worldwide common standards as defaults -- even if
Squeak can do so much more almost instantly in the hands of an expert. Now
Squeak has many other amazing *successes*, and they are *amazing* successes
(like Croquet or Seaside or eToys or Sophie or Scratch, etc.) -- but taming
complexity for the average newbie (or even experienced Squeaker) is not one
of them.

And I don't think those successes are mutually exclusive of taming
complexity. In fact, I think they are all the more startling and heroic for
the untamed complexity they have overcome. But everybody is not as hard
working or motivated.

Should not the whole point of something like Squeak be to make us lazy
people more productive (whether lazy in terms of learning key combinations,
or lazy in terms of not wanting to wade through a thousand classes to find
the code we just wrote, or lazy in terms of not wanting to debug stripped
and restripped images endlessly to see what got stripped accidentally or
what is not needed)? Why can't Squeak also be for us lazy people who are
used to how the rest of the world does things, instead of sending us off to
Python or Ruby or wherever? :-)

--Paul Fernhout

On Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:44:15 -0800, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Personally I'd map plain shift-- (ie underscore) since  
underscores_have_no_place_in_variable_names."

[checks Bible]

Well, I'll be, Exodus 4:2.

"And the Lord said unto him, 'What is that in tine hand?' And he said,  
'It's a rod.' And Lord said, 'No, it's not. It's an underscore. What were  
thou planning to doeth with that?' And Moses said, 'Smite Egyptians?' And  
the Lord said, 'Thou wouldst use in thine variable names? As an affront to  
thy Lord?'"

Well, it only gets worse from there.

tim further wrote: "Similarly I'd use ordinary ^ for return on the  
keyboard."

Isn't that the way it works now?

I'm pro-left-arrow because it is completely unambiguous. I'm a long time  
Pascal-er (sticks tongue out at Tim) and truth is, when you use the  
colon-equal for assign, you end up mistakenly forgetting the colon. (Same  
problem in reverse in C with ==.) With Pascal (unlike C or Smalltalk),  
it's unlikely to compile when you screw it up. But it's a common novice  
problem and even sneaks up on old pros from time-to-time.

On Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:12:47 -0800, Paul D. Fernhout  
<[hidden email]> wrote:

> if Squeak can do so much more almost instantly in the hands of an  
> expert. Now Squeak has many other amazing *successes*, and they are  
> *amazing* successes (like Croquet or Seaside or eToys or Sophie or  
> Scratch, etc.) -- but taming complexity for the average newbie (or even  
> experienced Squeaker) is not one of them.

I agree but I'm not sure what that has to do with <-, though.

Honestly, I've taught kids the <- and they grasp it instantly. Funny  
enough, when the image broke the <- and swapped it out for _, they still  
got it. (Threw ME off, but they were fine.)

Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
Because you need authority to make certain changes and these changes
certainly will be seen as controversial by some. And no, that's not your
point as far as I can tell - unless your point is that there is no
unambiguous authority for Squeak today (which I agree).

Cheers,
   - Andreas

Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
Because you need authority to make certain changes and these changes
certainly will be seen as controversial by some. And no, that's not your
point as far as I can tell - unless your point is that there is no
unambiguous authority for Squeak today (with which I agree).

Cheers,
   - Andreas

On 4-Feb-08, at 6:57 PM, Blake wrote:

> On Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:44:15 -0800, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]>  
> wrote:
>
> "Personally I'd map plain shift-- (ie underscore) since  
> underscores_have_no_place_in_variable_names."
>
> [checks Bible]
I checked the GFSM and His Noodliness is quoted as exhorting the  
massed faithful to eschew underscores since they are not as tasty as  
overscores (and why don't have overscores? eh?) and thus worthless in  
His Tentacled Eyes

>
>
> tim further wrote: "Similarly I'd use ordinary ^ for return on the  
> keyboard."
>
> Isn't that the way it works now?
Well yes but I'd have it displayed as the rinky-dink curvy arrow. Just  
Because.

>
>
> I'm pro-left-arrow because it is completely unambiguous. I'm a long  
> time Pascal-er (sticks tongue out at Tim)

I'm a long time ago Pascalier and in fact wrote one of the early solid  
modellers in it. All I can say is yeuuuuuuch. Pascal is about as good  
an idea as java, but less popular.


> and truth is, when you use the colon-equal for assign, you end up  
> mistakenly forgetting the colon.

And we all know that doctor's remind us not to forget our colons. At  
least one friend of mine has died from that.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Oxymorons: Government organization

On Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:09:55 -0800, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:

> I checked the GFSM and His Noodliness is quoted as exhorting the massed  
> faithful to eschew underscores since they are not as tasty as overscores  
> (and why don't have overscores? eh?) and thus worthless in His Tentacled  
> Eyes

Oh, a heathen, eh?

>> tim further wrote: "Similarly I'd use ordinary ^ for return on the  
>> keyboard."
>>
>> Isn't that the way it works now?
> Well yes but I'd have it displayed as the rinky-dink curvy arrow. Just  
> Because.

So, it's not enough for you to succeed. Everyone else must fail?

>> I'm pro-left-arrow because it is completely unambiguous. I'm a long  
>> time Pascal-er (sticks tongue out at Tim)
>
> I'm a long time ago Pascalier and in fact wrote one of the early solid  
> modellers in it. All I can say is yeuuuuuuch. Pascal is about as good an  
> idea as java, but less popular.

Object Pascal is probably the best of the static retrofitted-to-object  
languages. (OK, admittedly low bar.)

>> and truth is, when you use the colon-equal for assign, you end up  
>> mistakenly forgetting the colon.
>
> And we all know that doctor's remind us not to forget our colons. At  
> least one friend of mine has died from that.

I had a friend who forgot and ended up with a semi-colon. Which is also  
not good.

ROFL :-).

Gulik.


--
http://people.squeakfoundation.org/person/mikevdg
http://gulik.pbwiki.com/

> As impressive as it was for Dan Ingalls to make that version of  
> Squeak, and
> then Pavel to decompile the result into source, so what? What is  
> the license
> of it all (either origins or decompiled version)? How well factored  
> is it?

This is not clear, you're right.

> Does it have nay hope to be supported by a community? Does it take  
> advantage
> of the Java/JVM platform, including threading and multi-processor  
> support?
> Or interoperate easily back and forth with Java libraries like  
> Jython can?

I haven't looked at deeply, but I strongly suspect that no  
interaction is actually possible with Java.

I am currently working on this.
http://bergel.eu/athena for more info

Cheers,
Alexandre

--
_,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:
Alexandre Bergel  http://www.bergel.eu
^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.