Why Smalltalk ? Which Smalltalk ?

I just came across these and I think they are very well written.

Why Smalltalk ?

http://smalltalkzen.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/why-smalltalk/

Which Smalltalk ?

http://smalltalkzen.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/which-smalltalk/

I agree mostly with both pieces, they express reasonably well how I see things.

I don't know the author's name though...

Sven

On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:

Really? The third question has 3 wrong answers...


Levente

>
> I don't know the author's name though...
>
> Sven
>

of course :)
Now he should have say that the focus of pharo is to support business and build
new generation tools and infrastructure and open new space.

Le 20 déc. 2010 à 23:31, Sven Van Caekenberghe a écrit :

Dmitri Zagidulin  ;-)

>
> Sven

On 21 Dec 2010, at 00:14, Levente Uzonyi wrote:

> Really? The third question has 3 wrong answers...

OK, I'll take the bait: I was looking for a high-quality, professional, well-maintained open-source Smalltalk supported by an active community with the right ideas, attitudes and ideals going forward, and I am happy I found it. And it seems I am not the only one.

Sven

On Tue, 21 Dec 2010, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:

>
> On 21 Dec 2010, at 00:14, Levente Uzonyi wrote:
>
>> Really? The third question has 3 wrong answers...
>
> OK, I'll take the bait: I was looking for a high-quality, professional, well-maintained open-source Smalltalk supported by an active community with the right ideas, attitudes and ideals going forward, and I am happy I found it. And it seems I am not the only one.

I guess you're missing my point, which is: the post has false statements.
And a decision is based on these false statements.


Levente

>
> Sven
>
>
>

El mar, 21-12-2010 a las 18:51 +0100, Levente Uzonyi escribió:
Maybe you can show us the false statements and not let us guess what are
you refering to


--
Miguel Cobá
http://twitter.com/MiguelCobaMtz
http://miguel.leugim.com.mx

On Tue, 21 Dec 2010, Miguel Cobá wrote:
IMHO there's no need to guess and it's better to discuss it in the blog
itself, but here you go:

"Although I.ve worked with .plain Squeak. for a number of years, the
Pharo fork was a fairly easy choice since it focuses on
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. So I
consider it false. d) is clearly true, but not a strong argument, because
Seaside is cross-platform.


Levente

Den 21.12.2010 18:57, skrev Miguel Cobá: b) and c) definetely.
The situation was rather different back around april, if his last
exposure to Squeak was back then it could be called merely outdated.
a) is debatable I guess, with the unloading work that's been done in
Squeak, depending on how you define "removing".  (I think Cuis would win
this one hands down if it were included for consideration though)

Cheers,
Henry

On 21 Dec 2010, at 19:16, Levente Uzonyi wrote:

> 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.

Sven

Em 21-12-2010 16:31, Sven Van Caekenberghe escreveu:
> On 21 Dec 2010, at 19:16, Levente Uzonyi wrote:
>
>> 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.
Following blogs, forums & e-mail lists you'll find these issues have
been discussed since 2008 (at least). Split had little to do with
technical issues (unfortunately).
I agree with (b) & (c) false, (a) half-true & (d) true.

I guess that both communities must learn from successes & errors from
each other. Currently neither squeak nor pharo have enough technical
differences to claim significant superiority over the other. One thing I
like in squeak is that's possible to update it without having to backup
& reinstall. On the other hand, pharo has a nicer way of installing stuff.
> Sven
>
>
>
CdAB

Well, it seems like both pages have made it to the front page of

 news.ycombinator.com

 reddit.com/programming/

with some good comments, this is great publicity!

(And no, I didn't post them.)

On 21 Dec 2010, at 13:08, Cédrick Béler wrote:

On Tue, 21 Dec 2010, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:

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
>
>
>

On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:

> Well, it seems like both pages have made it to the front page of
>
> news.ycombinator.com
>
> reddit.com/programming/
>
> with some good comments, this is great publicity!
>
> (And no, I didn't post them.)

It's sad, because one of posts has false informations which may affect
other's decisions. At least Colin pointed out one of them.


Levente

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.

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.

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

Amazing, it really appears to be that it hurts you everything about
Pharo. Even as a mere mention of Pharo in some blog it can trigger a
retaliation from you. I can't imagine how many spare hours you have to
dedicate to build this impressive list of facts but I think that even
the data is (I believe) correct, the aim isn't clear to me. Why? Why is
this converting in some kind of "mine is bigger than yours"? It is
because the changes you make for Squeak are meant for Squeak use only?
That is something that you can't avoid, because the license is MIT. It
is because even with that impressive amount of patches that Squeak
receives, Squeak remains the same niche as it was 3 or 5 years before.
As you can maybe sense, is needed more than technical skills to build a
project. So, maybe you are right and Squeak has better bits inside it
but for the +10 year it has living, Pharo has come to match and, my
*personal opinion* left behind Squeak in only 2 years. That evidence
that not only good, best-performance, mathematically perfect solutions
are needed, but also a motivated community.
But again, I don't know what is the precise reason of your disdain for
Pharo. Because most Pharo people were Squeak people. We aren't coming to
steal your house and kill your children, we just want other kind of
Smalltalk. Is that a sin in the Squeak church? If it is, then glad Pharo
forked it. But, as minimal our steps are, they are honest and with a
vision. Don't take it personal.
As Stéphane said in other mail, we would be more than happy to have your
skills dedicated to Pharo, but your comments minimizing the Pharo team's
work although allowed are not welcome.

May the cordiality be king here and more happy collaborations begin.

Cheers

El mié, 22-12-2010 a las 18:49 +0100, Levente Uzonyi escribió:
--
Miguel Cobá
http://twitter.com/MiguelCobaMtz
http://miguel.leugim.com.mx

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.

--
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.

Personally I haven't read any real animosity from Levente toward Pharo
in this thread.

His issue was not the choice of Pharo but rather the incorrect
information stated as a basis of the decision. Pharo has enough good
things to represent itself without basing decisions on false data. I
happen to agree with Levente about the correctness of those statements.
But those were the understandings of the poster which did so without any
expressed ill intent toward Squeak. People make mistakes.

And to be clear as to my understanding
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),
Squeak did not start as a children's education project.

To quote the Squeak history page
"""
The goal was to build a system using a language as expressive and
immediate as Smalltalk to pursue various application goals such as
prototypical educational software, user interface experiments and
another run at the Dynabook concept.
"""
One goal out of the three expressed was for education software, which
can entail much more than children's education.

The other two goals had nothing to do with education.

b) clearer licensing (MIT license),
Not an issue at all at the time of the post. And it is not clear that it
was a real issue at the time of his decision for Pharo. In my opinion
the Squeak license wasn't much of an issue for most people unless you
had to answer to some corporate types. And even before Squeak became
primarily MIT, it had been released under the Apache license, which a
portion still remains. Squeak just happened to pursue a more challenging
vetting of the source code prior to re-licensing.

c) more frequent updates (think Ubuntu versus Debian), and

I can see how this could be an opinion. And I see how some would
disagree with it.

d) being a reference implementation for the Seaside platform (perfect,
exactly what I need it for).

Yes, the current maintainers develop on Pharo and explicitly do not
support anything else. And yes, there was a brief time that Squeak was
not easily usable for Seaside. But that is no longer the case. Nor is
the fact that the current maintainers using Pharo for development mean
that the other ports of Seaside are any less Seaside, or less current,
or less maintained. Nor does the blogger expressly state that either.

Now on his blog he has edited the page to denote comments from this
thread. He comments that he got these opinions from the Pharo Wikipedia
entry. From that source I can see how he came to some of these conclusions.


I am pro Pharo, it is what I am using to develop my business
application. I am not anti Squeak.

The good energy in this community needs to be based on honest truths
about the benefits of Pharo. Those benefits have absolutely nothing to
do with any deficiencies in Squeak. Lets keep this a pro Pharo energy,
not an anti Squeak energy. A person can choose either and have made an
excellent decision.

There are technical differences between Squeak and Pharo. There are also
vision and community differences. Plenty of real reasons to choose
between them.

For me, my vision and goals, Pharo is a more comfortable fit. Its a
personal decision.

So please, don't make me persona non grata for this post. :)
And lets give Levente a break. I don't see any evil in his post. There
is no wrong in seeking accurate statements. Pharo would want such from
the Squeak side of things.

And on to good positive energy and the fruits thereof.

Jimmie

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.