Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
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Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
 
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https://twitter.com/jamescham/status/1370955307799613441?s=20
I retweeted it. A friend of mine responded thus: « Ludicrous price, image based persistence making software distribution a nightmare, trivial 'image wide' malware, and the inability to run anything not written in smalltalk. And 'No'. » The price is now moot since there are multiple FOSS implementations, but a couple of the other points seem quite telling... or do they? -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [hidden email] – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: [hidden email] Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 |
Re: Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
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> On 2021-03-15, at 10:30 AM, Liam Proven <[hidden email]> wrote: > > https://twitter.com/jamescham/status/1370955307799613441?s=20 > > I retweeted it. A friend of mine responded thus: > > « > Ludicrous price, image based persistence making software distribution > a nightmare, trivial 'image wide' malware, and the inability to run > anything not written in smalltalk. And 'No'. > » > > The price is now moot since there are multiple FOSS implementations, > but a couple of the other points seem quite telling... or do they? Nope. They're utterly wrong in a wrongness level rarely achieved. tim -- tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim A bug in the code is worth two in the documentation. |
Re: Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
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On Mon, 15 Mar 2021 at 18:43, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
> > Nope. They're utterly wrong in a wrongness level rarely achieved. Go on, please. I am eager to know _why_. -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [hidden email] – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: [hidden email] Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 |
Re: Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
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In reply to this post by Liam Proven
Hi Liam. Is this a typical low-effort "You tell me why I should care?"-situation? :-) Well, if you want to figure out whether your friend is right or wrong, you could try creating a non-trivial thing in Squeak. This involves getting to know the entire system, not just the Smalltalk language and standard library. You would have to figure out how Squeak's tools work and how to shorten the feedback cycle to the level you are most comfortable with. --- After that, you are qualified to ponder about what modern Web browsers (+ DOM/CSS/JavaScript) have achieved yet, and what they still miss. Maybe also include the motivation behind Docker and containerization in general. Just kidding. :-) Or am I? Best, Marcel
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Re: Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
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On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 09:45, Marcel Taeumel <[hidden email]> wrote:
> > Hi Liam. > > > [...] but a couple of the other points seem quite telling... or do they? > > Is this a typical low-effort "You tell me why I should care?"-situation? :-) :-( Well, no. I did present a talk advocating Smalltalk as a possible basis for a next-generation OS just last month and have discussed it at some length on this ML. But I am not in any way an expert in it. I tweeted about it, and now Twitter is showing me tweets about Smalltalk, including this one. Honestly, I hoped that some Squeak practitioners here might want to go and engage themselves, or perhaps even suggest things I could counter this negativity with. > Well, if you want to figure out whether your friend is right or wrong, you could try creating a non-trivial thing in Squeak. This involves getting to know the entire system, not just the Smalltalk language and standard library. You would have to figure out how Squeak's tools work and how to shorten the feedback cycle to the level you are most comfortable with. --- After that, you are qualified to ponder about what modern Web browsers (+ DOM/CSS/JavaScript) have achieved yet, and what they still miss. Maybe also include the motivation behind Docker and containerization in general. > > Just kidding. :-) Or am I? "Go and see for yourself" is sadly a very common rejoinder when asking programmers for information about programming languages, but it is pretty much never a helpful one. :-( -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [hidden email] – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: [hidden email] Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 |
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Hi Liam.
I am happy to read that there is actual interest behind your initial question, which -- to be honest -- looked rather provocative to me. ;-) Sorry, if my previous answer did irritate you in some way. > Honestly, I hoped that some Squeak practitioners here might want to go > and engage themselves, or perhaps even suggest things I could counter > this negativity with. Well, countering a fundamentally negative attitude is in my experience not worth the effort if the topic-under-discussion may not even be relevant at all. Especially that thing about "malware" hints at a rather negative disposition toward people in general. Yet, I am always happy to answer open-minded questions about Squeak and its concepts. So, what aspects do you care for? Do you really have, say, hard real-time or security concerns? Or are you more interested in "augmenting human intellect" (see Douglas Engelbart) through a computational system? :-) Best, Marcel
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Re: Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
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On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 14:47, Marcel Taeumel <[hidden email]> wrote:
> > Hi Liam. > > I am happy to read that there is actual interest behind your initial question, which -- to be honest -- looked rather provocative to me. ;-) Sorry, if my previous answer did irritate you in some way. It may have been, but it was _not my question_. > > Well, countering a fundamentally negative attitude is in my experience not worth the effort if the topic-under-discussion may not even be relevant at all. Especially that thing about "malware" hints at a rather negative disposition toward people in general. Yes and no. Up to a point I find Twitter useful for this: the shortness of posts mandates being terse and that tends to mean clear, quick, succinct. It prevents people from going on and on like a politician facing a difficult question. > Yet, I am always happy to answer open-minded questions about Squeak and its concepts. I don't know if you saw my talk, or read the script, or anything. If not, you might find it interesting, and then you would understand my position. The video is here: https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/new_type_of_computer/ Transcript, slides, etc: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/77065.html I am very much more on this side: > Or are you more interested in "augmenting human intellect" (see Douglas Engelbart) through a computational system? :-) -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [hidden email] – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: [hidden email] Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 |
Re: Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
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Hi Liam.
> It may have been, but it was _not my question_. Oh, it sure was. You quoted something from Twitter added something like "Is he right?". That's definitely low effort. ;-) > [...] the shortness of posts mandates being terse and that tends to mean clear, quick, succinct [...] Ha! If anything, promotes laziness. Writing clear, concise, and correct thoughts takes a lot of effort. With more text, there is at least some chance that not-so-good writes may express themselves somehow. Without that, what's left is often superficial rant because there are not so many good writers out there. Just my two cents. :-) > I don't know if you saw my talk, or read the script, or anything. If > not, you might find it interesting, and then you would understand my> position. I will do that. Thanks for sharing. :-) Best, Marcel
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Re: Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
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Side note:
> > [...] the shortness of posts mandates being terse and that tends to mean clear, quick, succinct [...] >
> Ha! If anything, promotes laziness. Writing clear, concise, and correct thoughts takes a lot of effort.
Being brief takes a lot of effort, too, I can tell you ... ;-)
Best,
Christoph
Von: Squeak-dev <[hidden email]> im Auftrag von Taeumel, Marcel
Gesendet: Dienstag, 16. März 2021 16:04:16 An: squeak-dev Betreff: Re: [squeak-dev] Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
Hi Liam.
> It may have been, but it was _not my question_.
Oh, it sure was. You quoted something from Twitter added something like "Is he right?". That's definitely low effort. ;-)
> [...] the shortness
of posts mandates being terse and that tends to mean clear, quick, succinct [...]
Ha! If anything, promotes laziness. Writing clear, concise, and correct thoughts takes a lot of effort. With more text, there is at least some chance that not-so-good writes may express
themselves somehow. Without that, what's left is often superficial rant because there are not so many good writers out there. Just my two cents. :-)
> I don't know if you saw my talk, or read the script, or anything. If
> not, you might find it interesting, and then you would understand my> position. I will do that. Thanks for sharing. :-)
Best,
Marcel
Carpe Squeak!
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Re: Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
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On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 16:49, Thiede, Christoph
<[hidden email]> wrote: > > Side note: > > Being brief takes a lot of effort, too, I can tell you ... ;-) "Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte," as Blaise Pascal said. Mark Twain rendered it as "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." But you get used to it... -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [hidden email] – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: [hidden email] Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 |
Re: Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
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In reply to this post by Liam Proven
Liam, our problem here is at least in part one of weariness. If you were to read back in the mail list archives you'd find ... many, perhaps hundreds?... of times when somebody has asked us collectively to explain "why Smalltalk?" Sometimes it is genuinely curious people that want to understand, that listen and then join the collective, err, I mean the team.
Often, so very often, it is somebody wanting a fight over some crypto-religious point. Bizarrely, quite a lot of people seem to be threatened by the idea of a not-dead-text-in-files world. A looong time ago we suffered a prolonged attack of "it must be changed to be just like Visual BASIC or it will die!!!" demands. Dan Ingalls even responded by making an alternate syntax setup that allowed code to be written and presented as a BASIC-like text. We have long suffered from drive-by idiocy telling us that an interpreted language with all that wasteful trash of structure and garbage collection and message sending cannot possibly work and will always be slow and nobody will ever understand it and you can't write applications in it and real programmers use XXXXX (where XXXXX is flavour of the month on some gitidiot/slashdot type site) and by the way you people have bad breath. Presenting facts does essentially nothing to stop this. If you want to see some decent quality Smalltalk evangelism and explanation, try quora.com and look for articles by people like 'Mr Smalltalk', Richard Eng. He's had to pretty much retire from this effort for medical reasons but he put a *lot* of effort into presenting things. Obviously, never look at any other parts of Quora - the site that is an existence proof that not only are there, in fact, stupid questions but that there is a near infinite supply of people wanting to ask them again and again and again. The couple of tweets you pointed to seem to me to be excellent examples of people that have no interest at all in understanding or learning anything new. It's just another case of "somebody is wrong on the internet" and I fear most of us here are a bit worn out with that. tim -- tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now. |
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On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 20:09, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
> > Liam, our problem here is at least in part one of weariness. If you were to read back in the mail list archives you'd find ... many, perhaps hundreds?... of times when somebody has asked us collectively to explain "why Smalltalk?" Sometimes it is genuinely curious people that want to understand, that listen and then join the collective, err, I mean the team. > > Often, so very often, it is somebody wanting a fight over some crypto-religious point. Bizarrely, quite a lot of people seem to be threatened by the idea of a not-dead-text-in-files world. A looong time ago we suffered a prolonged attack of "it must be changed to be just like Visual BASIC or it will die!!!" demands. Dan Ingalls even responded by making an alternate syntax setup that allowed code to be written and presented as a BASIC-like text. That is impressive! > We have long suffered from drive-by idiocy telling us that an interpreted language with all that wasteful trash of structure and garbage collection and message sending cannot possibly work and will always be slow and nobody will ever understand it and you can't write applications in it and real programmers use XXXXX (where XXXXX is flavour of the month on some gitidiot/slashdot type site) and by the way you people have bad breath. Presenting facts does essentially nothing to stop this. Well, I do sympathise. I have been digging into language and OS design for more than a decade now, and I keep finding impressive, inspiring new developments that get shouted down by _hoi polloi_ because they are different and not like what people are used to. > If you want to see some decent quality Smalltalk evangelism and explanation, try quora.com and look for articles by people like 'Mr Smalltalk', Richard Eng. He's had to pretty much retire from this effort for medical reasons but he put a *lot* of effort into presenting things. Obviously, never look at any other parts of Quora - the site that is an existence proof that not only are there, in fact, stupid questions but that there is a near infinite supply of people wanting to ask them again and again and again. Ha! I have been banned from Quora. My crime was using a fake name. My account name was "Liam Proven", my actual, real, legal name since birth and what it says on my passport. "Proven" is a buzzword on Quora, clearly. > The couple of tweets you pointed to seem to me to be excellent examples of people that have no interest at all in understanding or learning anything new. It's just another case of "somebody is wrong on the internet" and I fear most of us here are a bit worn out with that. ISWYM. I had hoped for some rebuttal that I could send back, but I see that that would be a big ask when everyone's tired of the same sort of heckling. :'( -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [hidden email] – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: [hidden email] Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 |
Re: Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
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In reply to this post by Liam Proven
Hi Liam, On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 6:28 AM Liam Proven <[hidden email]> wrote: On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 09:45, Marcel Taeumel <[hidden email]> wrote: The major rebuttal is the success stories for Smalltalk. #1 everyone's cell phone (and I mean *everyone's* that isn't a gate array prototype) is built by fab machines controlled using Smalltalk. ControlWORKS is the distributed control system built in Smalltalk built by Texas Instruments, funded by DARPA, in the late '80's. ControlWORKS is now owned by Rudolph, an Austrian company. ControlWORKS is written in VisualWorks Smalltalk. See Lam Research's Smalltalk use. The only kind of machine Lam don't make is lithography. Their machines, or machines built by copying their machines, build everything else. AMD has (had?) their own fab plant, also using ControlWORKS. Essentially all of the world's chips are made in wafer fab machines controlled by Smalltalk. The value of wafers is such (> $1m per wafer) and the physics used so bleeding edge that to achieve down times below 4 hours per year a dynamic language is necessary for in-production maintennance. #2. also VisualWorks, OOCL's ISIS 2 software, a hybrid of Smalltalk and C++ schedules > 60% of world container traffic. Scheduling container traffic is complex. Optimal loading and unloading order decides ship balance, and delivery time. A given container's contents may be bought and sold more than once during shipping, cuz shipping takes several days (eg 4 days China to US). There's some very interesting spicy history with sales of ISIS 2. OOCL sold a copy to COSCO, the Chinese state shipping company. The agreed price involved the governorship of Hong Kong going to a member of OOCL's owning family. #3. JPMorganChase's system of record is a Smalltalk database. Also part of the Kapital system is a futures and derivatives trading "spreadsheet" that allows traders to deal in probability envelopes, which is informed by a simulation of the world's financial markets. All of this is a combination of GemStone and VisualWorks Smalltalk. Kapital paid for the entire $35 m initial development cost in the first 4 days of operation. In the early years of the century I was informed it generated $1.1B annual profits for JPMC. Notably Kapital survived attempts to replace it both with Java and Python competitors on more than two occasions, surviving the merger of JPM & Chase. I'm also informed that the simulation system maxed out gigabit fibre in generating data and caused the meltdown of processors in a datacentre. #4. BMW's parts library, the back end of their CAD system, is a VisualWorks application. #5. Deutsche Bahn's timetable is a VisualWorks app. This is challenging because there are equipment failures and track failures on a daily basis and so the timetable is a live application making rescheduling decisions constantly. and the list goes on; for example several leading insurance companies use Smalltalk. To understand why Smalltalk is used, the key attributes almost all these enterprise-class applications have is rapidly changing domains. For example, JPMC's market simulation has to deal with regulations changing around the globe. Kapital has a 4 day release cycle. Static languages simply can't keep up with the rate of change.
_,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot |
Re: Twitter Smalltalk discussion that may interest folk here
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On Thu, 18 Mar 2021 at 20:48, Eliot Miranda <[hidden email]> wrote:
> > #1 everyone's cell phone (and I mean *everyone's* that isn't a gate array prototype) is built by fab machines controlled using Smalltalk. ControlWORKS is the distributed control system built in Smalltalk built by Texas Instruments, funded by DARPA, in the late '80's. ControlWORKS is now owned by Rudolph, an Austrian company. ControlWORKS is written in VisualWorks Smalltalk. See Lam Research's Smalltalk use. The only kind of machine Lam don't make is lithography. Their machines, or machines built by copying their machines, build everything else. AMD has (had?) their own fab plant, also using ControlWORKS. Essentially all of the world's chips are made in wafer fab machines controlled by Smalltalk. The value of wafers is such (> $1m per wafer) and the physics used so bleeding edge that to achieve down times below 4 hours per year a dynamic language is necessary for in-production maintennance. This I had not heard of. Impressive. > #2. also VisualWorks, OOCL's ISIS 2 software, a hybrid of Smalltalk and C++ schedules > 60% of world container traffic. Scheduling container traffic is complex. Optimal loading and unloading order decides ship balance, and delivery time. A given container's contents may be bought and sold more than once during shipping, cuz shipping takes several days (eg 4 days China to US). There's some very interesting spicy history with sales of ISIS 2. OOCL sold a copy to COSCO, the Chinese state shipping company. The agreed price involved the governorship of Hong Kong going to a member of OOCL's owning family. Ditto... fascinating! > #3. JPMorganChase's system of record is a Smalltalk database. Also part of the Kapital system is a futures and derivatives trading "spreadsheet" that allows traders to deal in probability envelopes, which is informed by a simulation of the world's financial markets. All of this is a combination of GemStone and VisualWorks Smalltalk. Kapital paid for the entire $35 m initial development cost in the first 4 days of operation. In the early years of the century I was informed it generated $1.1B annual profits for JPMC. Notably Kapital survived attempts to replace it both with Java and Python competitors on more than two occasions, surviving the merger of JPM & Chase. I'm also informed that the simulation system maxed out gigabit fibre in generating data and caused the meltdown of processors in a datacentre. My ex-fiancée is or was one of the programmers who built that, and I've probably at least seen a demo of some tiny part of it. So this one, yes, I did know about. Fantastic anecdote, though. > #4. BMW's parts library, the back end of their CAD system, is a VisualWorks application. > > #5. Deutsche Bahn's timetable is a VisualWorks app. This is challenging because there are equipment failures and track failures on a daily basis and so the timetable is a live application making rescheduling decisions constantly. > > and the list goes on; for example several leading insurance companies use Smalltalk. To understand why Smalltalk is used, the key attributes almost all these enterprise-class applications have is rapidly changing domains. For example, JPMC's market simulation has to deal with regulations changing around the globe. Kapital has a 4 day release cycle. Static languages simply can't keep up with the rate of change. Absolutely wonderful stuff. Thank you! -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [hidden email] – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: [hidden email] Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 |
The major rebuttal is the success stories for Smalltalk.
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In reply to this post by Eliot Miranda-2
Thank you, Eliot. This was very informative. I have had a "hunch" about Smalltalk in the same way I had a "hunch" in the beginning days of Linux... I am keeping your talking points for future reference, they will come in handy when I have to explain why I am deleted PHP, Java, .NET, etc from my resume's skillset ! cordially, t ---- On Thu, 18 Mar 2021 15:48:09 -0400 Eliot Miranda <[hidden email]> wrote ----
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