Hadoop, if one wanted to utilize it in a similar way to Spark, Storm, Kafka, 
HDB, or the PostgreSQL overlay (the latter can be done now using either Garage 
+ GLORP, or slightly faster using the newer GLORP PostgreSQL integration), 
might be best implemented as a SQL driver.  Using GLORP with Garage via the 
other methods mentioned would give a similar ability to avoid map/reduce.  

Map/reduce, though, is 2/3’ds of the advantage of Hadoop, so avoiding it seems 
counterproductive if writing new code (simply using the PostgreSQL requires no 
new code).  

Granted, thinking how to do numerous things that have well known SQL solutions 
is not necessarily easy via map/reduce, which somewhat explains the 
proliferation of ways of avoiding it.  

On the other hand, not using it somewhat cripples the effectiveness of Hadoop, 
which is exacerbated by the concurrency limitations of using a JVM language, 
whether Java, Scala, or anything else that compiles to JVM bytecode.



Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: henry
Sent: Friday, October 27, 2017 5:03 PM
To: Any question about pharo is welcome
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument

Elastic search JSON integration would be another good one. I heard there was a 
Kafka integration, is that true? Where could I find that, I used to use Kafka.

Kafka is a great event channel for input to BigData. Using Kafka, it is well in 
crafting a Lamda Architecture. Imagine Pharo where Storm resides.



- HH


On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:51, henry <he...@callistohouse.club> wrote:
 How about Kerberos? Can we get a team to look closely at bringing integration 
for enterprise users? That would be helpful, or can you just put it behind a 
Kerberos wrapper? If that would work, collecting a demo, that could unlock more 
corporate wallets , for investment. 


- HH


On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 16:41, henry <he...@callistohouse.club> wrote:
How is there no steering committee to accumulate wrapping 3rd party libraries 
in Alien to gain benefits of code in other languages? Do not assume that code 
is not extremely well written in that particular language for that particular 
task and that particular deployment mechanism.

Can Pharo be called as a shared library from Java JNA?

- HH


On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 15:47, Andrew Glynn <aglyn...@gmail.com> wrote:
I’m not claiming I don’t or haven’t been affected, only that I no long allow 
myself to be.  Does that cause issues?  Of course.  But I’d rather deal with 
those than do things I don’t enjoy.  However I only got to that point after 26 
years in the industry, so I don’t expect that everyone will feel that way.
  
Cheers
Andrew
  
Sent from Mail for Windows 10
  
From: jtuc...@objektfabrik.de 
Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 8:14 AM 
To: pharo-users@lists.pharo.org 
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument
  
Andrew,

Am 26.10.17 um 00:46 schrieb Andrew Glynn: 
There’s other questions that are relevant to me: 
I am glad you opened your words with this sentence. Other peoples’ mileages may 
vary a lot. 
> Do I give a f*** about cool looking web apps?  No, I don’t use web apps if in 
> any way I can avoid it. 
  
Some people can’t. I can’t. I am making my living with a web based application. 
And I like it. 
  
> Do I give a f*** about mobile apps?  No, the screen’s too small to read 
> anything longer than a twit, or anyone with anything worthwhile to say.>

So you are in the lucky position that neither mobile nor web nor integration 
matters to you or you have enough resources to do all that stuff yourself. I am 
envyous. I need to build web pages and people ask me whether we can ship an 
iPhone App. I do customer-facing stuff and sex sells much more than we like to 
think.

Your comments on the crappiness of libs in other languages is a great fit for 
Smalltalk. Not invented here, therefor rubbish. We came a long way with this 
way of thinking. But these rubbish makers dance circles around us while we try 
to do our first hello world for an iPad. They laugh at us when we try to 
reinvent MVC on top of Seaside (although MVC is closesly related to Smalltalk). 
Because they are back home and watch Netflix while we debug our homegrown base 
libraries that are, of course, much better than theirs because they are written 
in Smalltalk.

I am not arguing that maintaining Smalltalk code is far superior to most 
technolgies out there. But depending on the needs of our projects we have to 
learn and use those crappy technologies to accomplish what they offer. Because, 
sometimes (especially if you have to pay bills), an existing library with flaws 
is better than none.

So if I have to use Javascript or C# or Dart or Swift to do the frontend part 
of my system, is there still much benefit in using these together with 
Smalltalk? Or is there - at least from a manager’s point of view - not a 
reasonable amount of sense in choosing the frontend technology also for the 
logic and compensate the loss in productivity with a gain in avoided 
complexity? 

Your answer delivers a lot of food for thought, but I don’t buy all of it. And 
I don’t expect you to buy all of mine ;-)


Joachim








  
  
Do I give a f*** about the number of libraries in other languages?  No, because 
most of them are crap in every language I’ve had to work in, and the base 
languages are crap so they have to keep changing radically, and libraries and 
frameworks therefore also have to and never get any better. The few that are 
worthwhile I can almost always use from Smalltalk without a problem (read, 
Blender, ACT-R and Synapse, since every other library/framework I’ve used 
outside Smalltalk has been a waste of time).  
  
Do I give a f*** about implementing a complex piece of machine learning 
software in 22 hours, compared to 3 months for the Java version?  Well, 
actually yes, I do, because that was 3 months of my life down the toilet for 
something that is too slow to be useful in Java. 
  
Any argument depends on your priorities. I’ve written tons of web apps, because 
I needed to get paid.  I’ve written better shitty mobile apps than the average 
shitty mobile apps.  However, I’m not going to do any of that any longer in 
crap that never improves, because after 26 years the irritability it produces 
is more than it’s worth.  
  
A few weeks ago, a recruiter that specializes in Smalltalk called me about a 
job, although they were well aware I live 1500 miles away from the city I lived 
in when I had worked through them, to see if I’d be willing to move back there 
for a job.  That sounds like another ‘there aren’t enough Smalltalk 
developers", but it wasn’t, because the job wasn’t writing Smalltalk.  It was 
writing Java. 
  
The person hiring, though, wouldn’t look at anyone who didn’t write Smalltalk, 
because "people who grew up with Java don’t know how to write code".  I don’t 
agree with that, I’ve known a (very few) good Java developers.  I would say, 
though, that I’ve known far more incompetent ones than good ones, and I can’t 
think of any incompetent Smalltalk developers off the top of my head.  
  
Nor have I ever heard a developer in Smalltalk, or Haskell, or LISP, or even C, 
complain about how hard maintaining state is or coming up with various hacks to 
avoid it, which seems to be the main point of every JavaScript based 
‘technology’.  An application is by definition a state-machine, which implies 
plenty about JS developers on the whole. 
  
If you’re a good developer you can write good code in (nearly) anything.  My 
question then is why would you want to write in crap?  The better question is 
why aren’t there more good developers in any language? 
  
Every project I have been able to do in Smalltalk, though, has had one thing in 
common, the "shit has to work".  Companies do use it, in fact I could name 4 
large enterprises I’ve worked for who’ve written their own dialects, and they 
all use it only when "shit has to work".  They know it’s more productive, they 
also know using it for more things would increase the availability of Smalltalk 
developers.  
  
Why do they not do it?  One reason, though it takes a while to recognize it, 
because management doesn’t admit even to themselves why they do it, or not very 
often.  Being inefficient, as long as it doesn’t ‘really’ matter, is an 
advantage to large enterprises because they have resources smaller competitors 
don’t.  
  
Why don’t their competitors do it?  Because they can’t see past an hourly rate, 
what’s fashionable, or just new, or because their customers can’t.  Put more 
generally, average stupidity that isn’t corrected by the market.  Fashion 
affects smaller companies more than larger ones, because they can’t afford a 
few customers walking away because they wanted an app in Electron, even if they 
can’t give any relevant reason for wanting it, and even the samples on the 
Electron site don’t work.  
  
Enterprises can, and do use Smalltalk when it matters.  When it doesn’t, it’s 
to their advantage to promote things that are inefficient, buggy and 
unreliable. 
  
Cost is relevant, but not in the simple way people look at things.  A crucial 
but rarely mentioned perspective on its relevance is that while Java based 
software runs TV set top boxes, Smalltalk based software runs things like 
medical equipment, automated defense systems, tanks, etc.  Cost becomes largely 
irrelevant when ‘shit has to work’.  
  
Productivity is primarily relevant to less talented developers, in an inversely 
sense, since unproductive environments and attitudes have a leveling tendency 
in general, and more specifically make accomplishing what the less talented are 
capable of in any environment sufficiently laborious for them to have a role.  
Capability in Smalltalk, as implied by the person hiring for the Java role I 
mentioned, is a fairly decent means of judging whether someone is a so-so 
developer or a good one. 
  
The productivity argument is realistically only relevant in the context of an 
already higher hourly cost.  Given that it is relevant at that point, companies 
that know Smalltalk is more productive would use it outside things that have to 
be 100%, if their own productivity were relevant to the same degree that 
competitors’ productivity is inversely relevant. 
  
All these ways of looking at it are contingent perspectives though.  Yes, if 
the number of libraries is relevant to you, Smalltalk is less attractive, but 
that’s only a contingent phenomenon based on the relative popularity of Java 
and JavaScript, as a result it can’t be used as explanatory for that 
popularity.  All the ways of looking at it that are fully determinate are 
determinate via contingencies of that kind, which for the most part are 
precisely the other perspectives, including productivity, cost, availability of 
developers, etc.  None of them is in itself anything but a result of the 
others.  
  
If availability of developers is contingent on popularity (and further, 
popularity contingent on industry attitudes), to use an example already 
mentioned in Joachim’s post, then his simultaneous posit of library 
availability is if anything more contingent on the same popularity, so positing 
it as a cause and not a result, or merely a correlate, of popularity is 
incoherent.  We can go one step further, and demonstrate that even when large 
enterprises make something that works reliably available, they fail to promote 
and support it, which destroys the market for reliable tooling by 
simultaneously owning it while not promoting it, something IBM is particularly 
good at.  But IBM can’t (and if they can’t, neither can any other company) 
operate that way without the tacit agreement of the industry.  
  
To understand it in a more general way, software development has to be looked 
at in the context where it occurs, and how it’s determined to a large degree by 
that context, with a specific difference.  That difference is itself implicit 
in the context, i.e. capitalism, but only purely effective in software 
development. It’s a result of virtualization as an implicit goal of capitalism, 
and the disruptions implicit in the virtual but so far only realized completely 
in software.  In terms of that understanding, the analysis of virtualization 
and disruption as inherent to capitalism is better accomplished in Kapital than 
in any more recent work. 
  
Or you can simply decide, as I’ve done recently, that working in ways and with 
tools that prevent doing good work in a reasonable timeframe isn’t worthwhile 
to you, no matter how popular those ways and tools might be, or what the 
posited reasons are, since at the end popularity is only insofar as it already 
is.  What those tools and methods are depends to a degree on your priorities, 
but if developers are engineers those priorities can’t be completely arbitrary. 
 Engineers are defined by their ability to make things work. 
  
Software as virtual is inherently disruptive, and the software industry 
disrupts itself too often and too easily to build on anything. A further 
disruption caused by developers, as engineers, refusing to work with crap that 
doesn’t, i.e. insisting on being engineers, while in itself merely an 
aggravation of the disruptive tendencies, might have an inverse result. 
  
Using a stable core of technologies as the basis for a more volatile set of 
products, in the way nearly every other industry does, is the best means we 
know of to build things both flexibly and reasonably efficiently.  The computer 
hardware industry is the extreme example of this, while the software industry 
is the extreme contradiction. 
  
From: Pharo-users <pharo-users-boun...@lists.pharo.org> on behalf of David 
Mason <dma...@ryerson.ca>
Reply-To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>
Date: Tuesday, October 24, 2017 at 11:52 AM
To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Smalltalk Argument 
  
PharoJS is working to give you that mobile app/browser app experience.  As with 
others, we’re not there yet, but getting there.  See http://pharojs.org 
  
The 67% loved means that 67% of people using Smalltalk (or perhaps have ever 
used it) want to continue - so it’s presumably a high percentage of a smallish 
number of people. 
  
On 20 October 2017 at 03:23, jtuc...@objektfabrik.de <jtuc...@objektfabrik.de> 
wrote: 
First of all: I’d say the question itself is not a question but an excuse. I am 
not arguing there are enough Smalltalkers or cheap ones. But I think the 
question is just a way of saying "we don’t want to do it for reasons that we 
ourselves cannot really express". If you are a good developer, learning 
Smalltalk is easy. If you are a good developer you’ve heard the sentence "we’ve 
taken the goos parts from x,y,z and Smalltalk" at least twice a year. So you 
most likely would like to learn it anyways.

A shortage of developers doesn’t exist. What exists is an unwillingness of 
companies to get people trained in a technology. If Smalltalk was cool and 
great in their opinion, they wouldn’t care. It’s that simple. As a consultant, 
I’ve heard that argument so often. Not ferom Startups, but from insurance 
companies, Banks or Car manufacturers who spend millions on useless, endless 
meetings and stuff instead of just hiring somebody to teach a couple of 
developers Smalltalk. It’s just a lie: the shortage of Smalltalk developers is 
not a problem.

And, to be honest: what is it we actually are better in by using Smalltalk?
Can we build cool looking web apps in extremely short time? No.
Can we build mobile Apps with little effort? No.
Does our Smalltalk ship lots of great libraries for all kinds of things that 
are not availabel in similar quality in any other language?
Are we lying when we say we are so extremely over-productive as compared to 
other languages?

I know, all that live debugging stuff and such is great and it is much faster 
to find & fix a bug in Smalltalk than in any other environment I’ve used so 
far. But that is really only true for business code. When I need to connect to 
things or want to build a modern GUI or a web application with a great 
look&feel, I am nowhere near productive, because I simply have to build my own 
stuff or learn how to use other external resources. If I want to build 
something for a mobile device, I will only hear that somebody somewhere has 
done it before. No docs, no proof, no ready-made tool for me.


Shortage of developers is not really the problem. If Smalltalk was as cool as 
we like to make ourselves believe, this problem would be non-existent. If 
somebody took out their iPad and told an audience: "We did this in Smalltalk in 
40% of the time it would have taken in Swift", and if that something was a 
must-have for people, things would be much easier. But nobody has.


I am absolutely over-exaggerating, because I make my living with an SaaS 
product written in Smalltalk (not Pharo). I have lots of fun with Smalltalk and 
- as you - am convince that many parts of what we’ve done so far would’ve taken 
much longer or even be impossible in other languages. But the advantage was 
eaten by our extremely steep learning curve for web technologies and for 
building something that works almost as well as tools like Angular or jQuery 
Mobile.

Smalltalk is cool, and the day somebody shows me something like Google’s 
flutter in Smalltalk, I am ready to bet a lot on a bright future for Smalltalk. 
But until then, I’d say these arguments about productivity are just us trying 
to make ourselves believe we’re still the top of the food chain. We’ve done 
that for almost thirty years now and still aren’t ready to stop it. But we’ve 
been lying to ourselves and still do so.

I don’t think there is a point in discussing about the usefulness of a language 
using an argument like the number or ready-made developers. That is just an 
argument they know you can’t win. The real question is and should be: what is 
the benefit of using Smalltalk. Our productivity argument is a lie as soon as 
we have to build something that uses or runs on technology that has been 
invented after 1990.


Okay, shoot ;-)

Joachim 


— 
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Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel          mailto:jtuc...@objektfabrik.de 
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D-71640 Ludwigsburg                  http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com 
Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0         Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1 

  
  
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Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel          mailto:jtuc...@objektfabrik.de
Fliederweg 1                         http://www.objektfabrik.de
D-71640 Ludwigsburg                  http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com
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