Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?
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Re: Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?
 
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Everyone,
Thank you for an great discussion! I'm the author of the post in question, and I appreciate you clearing up my misconceptions. At the time that I found out about the Pharo project, those were the differences that I could find, from Wikipedia (and i suspect i also misunderstood what it was saying). I've edited the post in light of this discussion. I do want to fully understand though. What are the technical differences between Squeak and Pharo? And what are some of the reasons you choose to work in it? Thanks, Dmitri Zagidulin On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 9:02 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K <[hidden email]> wrote: > In fairness to the blogger, it is not a stretch to go from Alan Kay's involvement in Squeak's origins to it's having started for the educational benefit of children. Early education has been a major focus of Alan's career. He probably WAS thinking "damn, this could be the dynabook that we would give to kids!" OLPC anyone? It was hardly a false statement; it's at best a difference of opinion. > > > > > |
Re: [OT] Re: Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?
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In reply to this post by Igor Stasenko
On 22/12/2010 23:24, Igor Stasenko wrote:
> guys, lets just stop pouring oil into the flames because it will burn > people in both camps, without any benefit to anyone. > > I am equivalently happy to see any good news about Squeak as well as > Pharo. Come on, there is enough space in boat for both of them, > not saying about other dialects. > Agreed. I for one am pleased that both Pharo and Squeak exist (and Cuis too!) since it allows different people with different priorities to work in different directions without stepping on each others toes. And, it's not like code developed in one system is automatically non-portable to the others :) |
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In reply to this post by Stéphane Ducasse
Stéphane,
I don't perceived Leventes email to be aggressive at all (in contrast to yours), but only to correct some false assumptions providing hard facts. If the Pharo community honestly believes that it is an open and friendly community, then there should be no problem with posts to the this mailinglist trying to provide some facts and not chiming in to any chorus. Just let me say that it doesn't serve Pharo well to say that something else lacks some features or is bad in many ways. That won't make Pharo any better. Emphasize on the great things Pharo has to offer by itself (and I believe that there are many). I think this would better suit Pharos vision. BTW, thanks Levente for the dates. There should be definitely some google timeline [1] where we could maintain the smalltalk milestones of the past. Jingle, Alex [1] Example http://simile-widgets.googlecode.com/svn/timeline/tags/latest/src/webapp/examples/religions/christianity.html 2010/12/22 Stéphane Ducasse <[hidden email]> Hi levente, |
Re: [OT] Re: Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?
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On Dec 23, 2010, at 1:23 PM, Alexander Lazarević wrote: > Stéphane, > > I don't perceived Leventes email to be aggressive at all (in contrast to yours), but only to correct some false assumptions providing hard facts. If the Pharo community honestly believes that it is an open and friendly community, then there should be no problem with posts to the this mailinglist trying to provide some facts and not chiming in to any chorus. ok alexander now I was not specifically aggressive but you seem to think I did. Strange. So this means that we cannot even have mild statements about MY own past. Funny how dogma can work. > Just let me say that it doesn't serve Pharo well to say that something else lacks some features or is bad in many ways. I did not say anything special but just put in perspective things. I have much more fun ideas about how to measure progress like the amount of money spent on projects but this requires data that we cannot find on the web :) > That won't make Pharo any better. Emphasize on the great things Pharo has to offer by itself (and I believe that there are many). I think this would better suit Pharos vision. Now I would like to keep this mailing list out of such discussion and yes if people wants to show facts that squeak is faster, better, move faster.... they can send them here but why not sending them in the squeak mailing-lists? I remember people telling to miguel that he was a troll just because he was arguing about process on squeak-dev. So? > BTW, thanks Levente for the dates. There should be definitely some google timeline [1] where we could maintain the smalltalk milestones of the past. You see milestones are just numbers. :) > Hi levente, > > after your mails some people sent me private mails because they did not feel well. They wondered why people were sending mails against pharo in this mailing-list while they do not send aggressive mails in squeak. > I can understand them. Now I think that this is ok that you send the mails you want, > you can send your feelings here, even if this is not that positive :). Kicks in the ass is always a feedback and we can make progress. > I always appreciated your benchmarks and precise remarks. I liked (and I told you publicly) that you always replied to my mails about your changes in squeak. I can understand your frustration (I have been there for years trying to move squeak - again we did not do pharo for an ego problem - I cannot tell the number of students that looked at me like I was an idiot to use a system with all the colors and messy menus). We do pharo to build an ecosystem where people can expand, create cool ideas and make money to live from them. > What is wrong with that? > > Now do not play pharo against squeak, it will not work on the mid term and this is not fun for everybody. I would love that Squeak builds its own real vision: for example been a real multimedia platform. We could have a lot of fun. Now I think that except a miracle this will not happen: after 10 years, squeak failed to go to the next level - I wanted everything and more Cairo, Zoomable interface, crazy ideas and all the rest - I was a big fan of Sophie (I can tell you that I was a bit fucked by some bulgarian people on that level trying to support Squeak and sophie there) and other impara tools. Now impara failed to make squeak sexy and them the center of the universe - They could have but may be they did not have the vision to be something else than > building tools for alan. Anyway this is life. Now I wonder why you get stuck in Squeak you are welcome in Pharo. May be Squeak fits your vision and spirit but I do not understand what we are doing wrong so that you are mad against us. > > Stef > |
Re: [OT] Re: Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?
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In reply to this post by Levente Uzonyi-2
Hi levente
> What I wanted to show is that the release of Pharo 1.0 was not urgent at all (DW and RW are both _more than a year_) until Squeak 4.1 came out. After the release of Squeak 4.1, Pharo 1.0 and 1.1 was released ASAP. since you want real facts, I can tell you that being the responsible with marcus of release dates we do not take into account squeak releases and that we do not release as soon as possible. So I can ensure you that this is a false facts. We do not take that into account. You can believe us or not this is not that important. I just say it for the record. Now what we did was learning: 1.0 was too long mainly the beta phase because we were looking for a copy and paste bug that was randomly showing up. In such a case beta at the end was more "this is public but missing one bug fix". But since you like numbers you can count they way you want. After we are looking at logical moment to stop so that people can sync their applications. But there is always the tension with new features getting ready. We discuss milestones topics in the pharo sprint which was hold in the same time than WCRE. And we try to be features oriented. For example, we decided not to open 1.3 when 1.2 got beta and to focus on not integrating easy bug fixes to get stability. In 1.1 it was different since lot of fixes were accumulating. Stef |
Re: [OT] Re: Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?
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In reply to this post by Stéphane Ducasse
On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
> Levente > > What do you want to prove? We pushed/supported squeak since 3.5 or even before. So what? We were harvesters of bug fixes long long long long time ago. We started to clean squeak years ago. Do you want me to come up with a similar timeline from our effort? I do not have that amount of time to lose. > We wrote most of the books and tutorial on Squeak. We built the squeakfoundation too btw :) > and we give you all that effort for free. People think that going pharo was an easy choice, this was not. > May be you do not believe that this is a lot but it is. > > Now please please nobody has to gain anything polluting the good energy we are creating. > You are free to believe what you want. We are free to do the way we want it. > > Levente we did pharo just to avoid arguing and get bad feelings. so keep this place nice friendly and welcoming. here. > > Stef > > PS: I can send you private mail to show you some evidence of the fact that our efforts to improve Squeak > got attacked by 'Important' squeaker. I guess you already sent that to me in March this year. Levente > >>>> a) removing unessential code from Squeak (Squeak, having started as a children.s education project, has accumulated a fair amount of cruft over the years), >>>> b) clearer licensing (MIT license), >>>> c) more frequent updates (think Ubuntu versus Debian), and >>>> d) being a reference implementation for the Seaside platform (perfect, exactly what I need it for)." >>>> >>>> b) and c) are clearly false. a) ignores the fact that you can unload quite a lot of "cruft" from Squeak making it comparable to Pharo-Core. >>> >>> I might be wrong, and I known that Squeak has been changing lately, but Pharo seems to have been the driver here, putting these issues on the map. >> >> The modularization of Squeak is an old idea (a). One such effort is Pavel's KernelImage project which dates back to 2006: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1873 >> >> The idea of relicensing Squeak (b) dates back to 2003 or earlier. Apple relicensed the original Squeak code in 2006 under the Apache license. AFAIK the MITification process started in 2006 or 2007: >> http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?SqueakRelicensePush. According to wikipedia the driving force was adding EToys to OLPC. >> >> I think that in case of the update frequency (c) Squeak was the driving force. Why? Let's see the timeline: >> >> 21 March 2008: Squeak 3.10 released >> 21 May 2008: Pharo forked Squeak 3.9 (the date may not be exact) >> 30 May 2008: First Pharo snapshot uploaded to gforge >> 02 July 2009: Squeak's new developement process announced (aka 3.11 developement cancelled) >> 31 July 2009: Pharo 1.0 Beta announced >> 16 March 2010: Squeak 4.0 comes out (same as Squeak 3.10, but with MIT license) >> 29 March 2010: Squeak 4.1 feature freeze announced >> 16 April 2010: Pharo 1.0 released >> 26 April 2010: Squeak 4.1 released (the first artifact of the new process) >> 16 May 2010: Pharo 1.1 Beta announced >> 26 July 2010: Pharo 1.1 released >> 08 December 2010: Pharo 1.2 Beta announced >> 13 December 2010: Squeak 4.2 feature freeze announced >> >> Pharo's developement cycle restarts after a beta. Squeak's developement cycle restarts after the release. So: >> >> Artifact DW RW WSPR >> ------------------------------------ >> Pharo 1.0 62 99 N/A >> Pharo 1.1 41 47 14 >> Pharo 1.2 29 >31 >21 >> Squeak 4.1 38 42 5 but irrelevant >> Squeak 4.2 33 >34 >34 >> >> DW = Developement weeks (number of weeks between cycle restart and feature freeze/beta) >> RW = Release weeks (number of weeks between cycle restart and release) >> WSPR = Weeks since previous release (number of weeks between releases) >> >> What I wanted to show is that the release of Pharo 1.0 was not urgent at all (DW and RW are both _more than a year_) until Squeak 4.1 came out. After the release of Squeak 4.1, Pharo 1.0 and 1.1 was released ASAP. >> >> So yes, I think you're wrong, just like Dmitri. >> >> >> Levente >> >>> >>> Sven >>> >>> >>> >> > > > |
Re: [OT] Re: Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?
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In reply to this post by Stéphane Ducasse
On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
> Hi levente, > > after your mails some people sent me private mails because they did not feel well. They wondered why people were sending mails against pharo in this mailing-list while they do not send aggressive mails in squeak. > I can understand them. Now I think that this is ok that you send the mails you want, > you can send your feelings here, even if this is not that positive :). Kicks in the ass is always a feedback and we can make progress. > I always appreciated your benchmarks and precise remarks. I liked (and I told you publicly) that you always replied to my mails about your changes in squeak. I can understand your frustration (I have been there for years trying to move squeak - again we did not do pharo for an ego problem - I cannot tell the number of students that looked at me like I was an idiot to use a system with all the colors and messy menus). We do pharo to build an ecosystem where people can expand, create cool ideas and make money to live from them. > What is wrong with that? > > Now do not play pharo against squeak, it will not work on the mid term and this is not fun for everybody. I would love that Squeak builds its own real vision: for example been a real multimedia platform. We could have a lot of fun. Now I think that except a miracle this will not happen: after 10 years, squeak failed to go to the next level - I wanted everything and more Cairo, Zoomable interface, crazy ideas and all the rest - I was a big fan of Sophie (I can tell you that I was a bit fucked by some bulgarian people on that level trying to support Squeak and sophie there) and other impara tools. Now impara failed to make squeak sexy and them the center of the universe - They could have but may be they did not have the vision to be something else than > building tools for alan. Anyway this is life. Now I wonder why you get stuck in Squeak you are welcome in Pharo. May be Squeak fits your vision and spirit but I do not understand what we are doing wrong so that you are mad against us. I don't like the idea what some Pharo users and developers (yes, that's including you too) are suggesting about Squeak. A few examples: - Squeak has no vision - Squeak should be a multimedia platform - the purpose of Squeak is to support EToys - Squeak should only be used for educational purposes - Squeak is a mess (while Pharo is clean) - Squeak is dead etc. IMHO Squeak is and should be "a modern, open source, full-featured implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment". This implies that it should be good for everything what Pharo is good for. Since I use it for software developement and I'm making a living with it - just like many other people in the past (including some of you) and present - it should be developer friendly too. Why "I got stuck in Squeak"? That's a long story, so let me tell you what I like better in Squeak than Pharo instead: - Squeak's update mechanism is a lot more stable. If you update your image you have ~99% chance that it will work with your already loaded packages. I can always use the bleeding edge version, because it's like a beta or rc. We have some deployed images which were updated from 3.10.2 to the current 4.2 (with Seaside and lot of other packages). - When it's possible to do something in a backwards compatible way, then it's usually done that way. - The contribution process is simpler. - The code changes appear on the mailing list. - Colorful windows make it easy to find the one you're looking for. Most windows are grey in Pharo even if you use a "Squeak theme". - The UI feels faster. - I use the toolbar with it's search tool all the time. The taskbar in Pharo doesn't seem to be useful, but that's probably because I used to find windows by colors. The list is not complete, but I guess the most important ones are here from a user's POV. Levente > > Stef > |
Re: [OT] Re: Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?
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levente
can you keep such kind of mails for Squeak-dev? Or I will have to add you to my filter. Stef >> Hi levente, >> >> after your mails some people sent me private mails because they did not feel well. They wondered why people were sending mails against pharo in this mailing-list while they do not send aggressive mails in squeak. >> I can understand them. Now I think that this is ok that you send the mails you want, >> you can send your feelings here, even if this is not that positive :). Kicks in the ass is always a feedback and we can make progress. >> I always appreciated your benchmarks and precise remarks. I liked (and I told you publicly) that you always replied to my mails about your changes in squeak. I can understand your frustration (I have been there for years trying to move squeak - again we did not do pharo for an ego problem - I cannot tell the number of students that looked at me like I was an idiot to use a system with all the colors and messy menus). We do pharo to build an ecosystem where people can expand, create cool ideas and make money to live from them. >> What is wrong with that? >> >> Now do not play pharo against squeak, it will not work on the mid term and this is not fun for everybody. I would love that Squeak builds its own real vision: for example been a real multimedia platform. We could have a lot of fun. Now I think that except a miracle this will not happen: after 10 years, squeak failed to go to the next level - I wanted everything and more Cairo, Zoomable interface, crazy ideas and all the rest - I was a big fan of Sophie (I can tell you that I was a bit fucked by some bulgarian people on that level trying to support Squeak and sophie there) and other impara tools. Now impara failed to make squeak sexy and them the center of the universe - They could have but may be they did not have the vision to be something else than >> building tools for alan. Anyway this is life. Now I wonder why you get stuck in Squeak you are welcome in Pharo. May be Squeak fits your vision and spirit but I do not understand what we are doing wrong so that you are mad against us. > > Let me respond to only those parts that weren't answered already: > I don't like the idea what some Pharo users and developers (yes, that's including you too) are suggesting about Squeak. A few examples: > - Squeak has no vision > - Squeak should be a multimedia platform > - the purpose of Squeak is to support EToys > - Squeak should only be used for educational purposes > - Squeak is a mess (while Pharo is clean) > - Squeak is dead > etc. > IMHO Squeak is and should be "a modern, open source, full-featured implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment". This implies that it should be good for everything what Pharo is good for. Since I use it for software developement and I'm making a living with it - just like many other people in the past (including some of you) and present - it should be developer friendly too. > > Why "I got stuck in Squeak"? That's a long story, so let me tell you what I like better in Squeak than Pharo instead: > - Squeak's update mechanism is a lot more stable. If you update your image you have ~99% chance that it will work with your already loaded packages. I can always use the bleeding edge version, because it's like a beta or rc. We have some deployed images which were updated from 3.10.2 to the current 4.2 (with Seaside and lot of other packages). > - When it's possible to do something in a backwards compatible way, then it's usually done that way. > - The contribution process is simpler. > - The code changes appear on the mailing list. > - Colorful windows make it easy to find the one you're looking for. Most windows are grey in Pharo even if you use a "Squeak theme". > - The UI feels faster. > - I use the toolbar with it's search tool all the time. The taskbar in Pharo doesn't seem to be useful, but that's probably because I used to find windows by colors. > > The list is not complete, but I guess the most important ones are here from a user's POV. > > > Levente > >> >> Stef >> |
Re: [OT] Re: Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?
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In reply to this post by Levente Uzonyi-2
2010/12/26 Levente Uzonyi <[hidden email]>:
> - Squeak is dead Levente, Squeak is dead for those who don't wanna use it. Pharo is dead for those who don't wanna use it. This is truth, and you don't need to waste your time trying to disprove that, especially knowing that it may hurt some passionate souls in both camps ;) -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig. |
Re: [OT] Re: Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?
Administrator
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In reply to this post by Levente Uzonyi-2
I like to look at Squeak and Pharo as two communities that give people a choice. A brief explanation for those who haven't been around for that long: a couple of years ago there were certain differences in vision and opinion which resulted in a number of Squeakers to start their own Smalltalk Implementation.
Pharo only says it will "not" support eToys, this does not mean it is Squeak's purpose is to support eToys, it only means Pharo will not. Absolutely, today there are those who prefer Squeak and the Squeak way and that is perfectly fine. On the other hand there are others who prefer Pharo and the Pharo way and thats fine too. Both Smalltalk Implementations are (amongs others) freely available to choose from for anyone interested in Smalltalk. Choice is and always has been a good thing. Looking at the size of both communities it clearly shows that there was justification to start the Pharo Smalltalk Implementation as well as continue Squeak Smalltalk. So every time there is a "which Smalltalk" question, everyone should try out the different Smalltalk Implementations (http://www.world.st/implementations) and decide which is best for its purpose because any new Smalltalker is good for the Smalltalk community irrespective of Smalltalk Implementation. |
Re: [OT] Re: Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?
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In reply to this post by Stéphane Ducasse
Can we all just chill and accept that occasionally there will be
misunderstandings? This is an English mailing list where the majority speak English as a second language (vastly better than I speak anything other than English!). As a native English speaker, there are frequently turns of phrase that I can see that someone might take as brusque or rude. So like the adage on implementing of protocols, please be conservative in your output (i.e. as polite and clear as possible) and liberal in your input (i.e. assume the best and that any perceived slight is from the imperfection of the medium). I have a preference for Pharo, but it is clearly in the Squeak family and internecine fighting is both unbecoming and anti-productive... the more cross fertilization between Squeak and Pharo, the better, although both will apply their own judgements. But more importantly, we are Smalltalkers. Smalltalk is a very important language, and the software development landscape will be a better place if more Smalltalk is used. So let's focus on talking about, and working on, our (dialect or language) strengths, and not on putting others down - whatever may have been the history. ../Dave |
Re: [OT] Re: Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?
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Administrator
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I have learned that people here are very passionate and one often needs to be able to read between the lines (and understand some of the history) but in the end of the day, its all good :) +1 completely agree! |
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