image overload

Hi All,
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On Friday 12 March 2010 11:29:20 pm Eliot Miranda wrote:
>     I'm sure Im opening an old topic but anyway, as I was riding the train
> to work today I saw a shop called "Audio Images" and it struck me how
> overloaded the term image is, and how poor a term for the contents of the
> image file Smalltalk image is.  What's in the image is a snapshot of...
> almost the entire system (minus platform-specific virtual machine and
> possibly minus sources).  So Smalltalk system file would be a far better
> term and stsys a more unique file extension (and according to Wikipedia STS
> is unused too).
If ever we change the image format, we should also change its name and
extension. The first time people hear the term, they think of 'picture'. I
suppose the term image is a Mac hangover :-).

I prefer "bit bag" (*.bag) or "bag of bits" (*.bob).

BTW, sts is already taken (Microsoft Visual C)

Subbu
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----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email] ; [hidden email] ; [hidden email]

Sent: Friday, March 12, 2010 9:59 AM

Subject: [vwnc] image overload

Hi All,

    I'm sure Im opening an old topic but anyway, as I was riding the train to work today I saw a shop called "Audio Images" and it struck me how overloaded the term image is, and how poor a term for the contents of the image file Smalltalk image is.  What's in the image is a snapshot of... almost the entire system (minus platform-specific virtual machine and possibly minus sources).  So Smalltalk system file would be a far better term and stsys a more unique file extension (and according to Wikipedia STS is unused too).  I can imagine that changing form image would be hugely expensive in documentation terms (docs, websites, workspaces, etc, etc).  But I can at least dream of a better term.

P.S.  I know, wasting one's time worrying about names.  Almost as bad as worrying about colours

"And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
"Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there."
"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
The marketing girl soured him with a look.
"Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."

---

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And it's alive, so maybe something like Sourdough starter, or Yoghurt.

"It sounds to me like your yoghurt is corrupted. You'll want to restart from a known good culture and reload your code."

At 02:24 PM 2010-03-12, Terry Raymond wrote:

Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
         boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0147_01CAC1EF.C3BA4730"
Content-Language: en-us

Well, if you think out of the box a bit, think of it as a sea of objects,
something organic or “ObjectSoup”.
 
However, what we tend to do is borrow a term that conveys how
we think about the image file. This invariably means the term will
be overloaded.
 
Terry

===========================================================
Terry Raymond
Crafted Smalltalk
80 Lazywood Ln.
Tiverton, RI  02878
(401) 624-4517      [hidden email]
< http://www.craftedsmalltalk.com>
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From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eliot Miranda
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2010 12:59 PM
To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list; Pharo Development; vwnc NC
Subject: [squeak-dev] image overload
 
Hi All,
 
    I'm sure Im opening an old topic but anyway, as I was riding the train to work today I saw a shop called "Audio Images" and it struck me how overloaded the term image is, and how poor a term for the contents of the image file Smalltalk image is.  What's in the image is a snapshot of... almost the entire system (minus platform-specific virtual machine and possibly minus sources).  So Smalltalk system file would be a far better term and stsys a more unique file extension (and according to Wikipedia STS is unused too).  I can imagine that changing form image would be hugely expensive in documentation terms (docs, websites, workspaces, etc, etc).  But I can at least dream of a better term.
 
P.S.  I know, wasting one's time worrying about names.  Almost as bad as worrying about colours
 
"And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
"Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there."
"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
The marketing girl soured him with a look.
"Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."

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--- On Fri, 3/12/10, Bruce Boyer <[hidden email]> wrote:

> From: Bruce Boyer <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [vwnc] image overload
> To: "Eliot Miranda" <[hidden email]>, "The general-purpose Squeak developers list" <[hidden email]>, "Pharo Development" <[hidden email]>, "vwnc NC" <[hidden email]>
> Date: Friday, March 12, 2010, 10:51 AM

-snip-

> Is there a recognizable
> term for the state of
> memory at a moment? 

It seems that Lispers phrase things a little differently, the SBCL file is called sbcl.core

3.2.3 Saving a Core Image
http://www.sbcl.org/manual/Saving-a-Core-Image.html




     


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I've always thought of the image file as more of an object database that lacks any useful API at the VI level. It sort of has an object index, the object table and it is portable between platforms, but you don't really have a query API for it. It would be kind of nice if we didn't really have an image file, but instead had distinct object databases per "package". This would be a more core version of image segments, parcels, etc and be linkable like an actual dll.

Wishful thinking probably.

Michael

On 3/12/10 11:06 AM, Kooyman, Les wrote:

"Is there a recognizable term for the state of memory at a moment?"

 

Isn't 'context' a good term for that? I know it's been used before, but seems appropriate.

 

Secondly, I like 'state' although that's a bit tautological.

---

From: [hidden email] on behalf of Bruce Boyer
Sent: Fri 3/12/2010 10:51 AM
To: Eliot Miranda; The general-purpose Squeak developers list; Pharo Development; vwnc NC
Subject: Re: [vwnc] image overload

This is rather a sensitive area with me at the moment, as I'm working on indexing docs.  I've had to resort to using "image" and "graphical image" to try to distinguish these two, but "image" remains unclear to anyone who doesn't already know.

 

I could guess that the term "snapshot" came first, as a methaphorical attempt to describe what saving that thing is, and "image" is what snapshots give (or pictures or something even worse for that thing).  But, it's only a guess.

 

If a really good term were proferred, the documentation cost will be amortized over a long period of time, so not a worry.  Getting it accepted by smalltalkers will be the harder problem.

 

I'm not sure, though, that "system file" is right.  The file part is just an artifact of saving the state of the system, providing a way to preserving it for a restart. 

 

Is there a recognizable term for the state of memory at a moment?  Cognitive scientists might have something, though I'm sure it would be hugely debated whether there is any such thing.

 

Waste of time?  Perhaps.  But, beats indexing :)

 

Bruce

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email] ; [hidden email] ; [hidden email]

Sent: Friday, March 12, 2010 9:59 AM

Subject: [vwnc] image overload

Hi All,

    I'm sure Im opening an old topic but anyway, as I was riding the train to work today I saw a shop called "Audio Images" and it struck me how overloaded the term image is, and how poor a term for the contents of the image file Smalltalk image is.  What's in the image is a snapshot of... almost the entire system (minus platform-specific virtual machine and possibly minus sources).  So Smalltalk system file would be a far better term and stsys a more unique file extension (and according to Wikipedia STS is unused too).  I can imagine that changing form image would be hugely expensive in documentation terms (docs, websites, workspaces, etc, etc).  But I can at least dream of a better term.

P.S.  I know, wasting one's time worrying about names.  Almost as bad as worrying about colours

"And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
"Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there."
"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
The marketing girl soured him with a look.
"Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."

---

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I get a feeling that we're talking about two different things here:

        1) the file
        2) the live system running

I think that 2) isn't particularly different from any other running program, be it a Java app or even a C app. So maybe it doesn't even need a special term, it's the running application.

It's the 1) that people seem to have difficulty with. For that I find 'snapshot' quite fitting as it emphasises the important property that the system isn't really live and running, it's a snapshot of the system at a particular moment in time. I don't think it's particularly different from a memory dump either (ignoring minor technical details). The practical difference is that we can readily revive the system from the snapshot and have it continue from that point on. As many times as we want in fact. That's probably not as easy with a memory dump, although presumably not impossible.

The obvious and direct analogy are the virtualization technologies reliving their renaisance these days. From what I've seen the term snapshot is used there as well for pretty much the same thing.

"Georg Heeg"<[hidden email]> wrote:
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On 3/12/10, Eliot Miranda <[hidden email]> wrote:
> But I see a snapshot file are more than just a memory dump.  It /is/ the
> entire Smalltalk system, class library, potentially compiler, debugger,
> tools.  It is in a format that requires the virtual machine to run it, but
> it is in fact the Smalltalk system in quiescent form.  It is not a memory
> dump.  It is only a dump of the Smalltalk object heap, not the entire memory
> space.

Nonetheless 'object memory' or just 'memory' is the best name for it.
Everything else that's been proposed sucks.

Snapshot and image suck not because they're abstract, because they're
not, they're *metaphorical*. They're metaphors from photography. What
the hell does photography have to do with operating systems or
programming languages?

[Is it just me or does it seem exceedingly odd for a Smalltalk
programmer to fail to know the meaning of the term 'abstract'? Or even
to use language so sloppily?]

System sucks because the object memory *isn't a system*. Systems are
sets of interacting objects. A book or novel isn't a system, no matter
how many parts it has, because none of those parts interact. The
object memory is dead on its own.

I'm actually quite surprised that you used the word 'memory' and
nobody cottoned onto why this is the near-perfect word for it. It's
descriptive or idiomatic (eg, virtual memory) and not at all
metaphorical. A memory is something that stores information, isn't it?

Soup and box are dumb. Replacing one bad metaphor with another bad
metaphor? Maybe some people around here need to crack open the basics
of interfaces, especially the difference between metaphoric,
idiomatic, and iconic. Metaphors are dumb.

Repeat after me everyone: METAPHORS ARE DUMB. Shout it! And yes this
includes 'system metaphors' which are for lesser developers anyways.

Getting back to the subject, the only thing that's needed in an idiom
is that it not cause interference by being insufficiently unique.
Image is obviously bad for any programmer dealing with photography or
any programmer describing smalltalk to a non-programmer that's ever
dealt with photography in their life (ie, everyone).

'Memory' or 'object memory' would similarly be bad for AI researchers
and people who deal with AIs (ie, almost no one). So let's worry about
that problem once people have household AIs in 2050. Assuming it
becomes a problem at all.
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The word state is kind of good. Its both a place and a condition and
is ambiguous enough to cover what we talk about.

karl

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Eliot Miranda <[hidden email]> wrote:
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On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 3:28 AM, Alan Knight <[hidden email]> wrote:
> And it's alive, so maybe something like Sourdough starter, or Yoghurt.
>
> "It sounds to me like your yoghurt is corrupted. You'll want to restart from
> a known good culture and reload your code."

I tried to save an image as hacking.im the other day and rename Object
as Dharma. VW took seconds to get this done and then I have the whole
image changed to Dharma world. This is not useful one might think. But
enlightened me, honestly.
--
Best Regards,

Jim G
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