Hello, first of all, have a wonderful 2020.. sorry for jumping in, I'm not a contributor to Pharo, and actually never a user of it ( when I work in Smalltalk, I use VW mostly, and still need to find the time to try Pharo seriously), but I do work in Smalltalk (and Pharo is a dialect of) from early 80'... and , as for many of you, Smalltalk is not the only language I use (I wish it was the most used, but not the only one, because one tool is not enough). Well, the idea that all should be done in Smalltalk seems to me something that us as a community have had as a goal from day one, but, are us sure it's not something that reduce the power of Smalltalk instead of allowing broader adoption?
- First, there are lots of libraries and tools already well written, maintained and with full documentation. Why to reinvent the wheels if we can integrate them seamlessly? - Second: Smalltalk is not the fastest language out there, there are works that are not to be developed in Smalltalk. If we develop in Smalltalk something very CPU intensive we just made bad advertising for the language. Smalltalk is at is best for modelling difficult problems. Look at Python, it's very popular between Data Scientist, but it just expose in a nice way an interface to Macchine Learning libraries, For example TensorFlow has a lot of optimised c++ code inside. Python made easy to interface with C like languages, and it has good modelling capabilities, so it was chosen. But Smalltalk is better on the latter, this is a campground we should dominate, instead we are absent. And Pharo, being open source, could have been a good player in this field. If we spend our time to reinvent the wheel we can't get to far .. Look at Node.js, you can find libraries for connecting everything, people doesn't rewrote everything in JS/ So if you work in Node, you are fast at building stuff not because of the power of the language, but because to the libraries you can pick from the shelf and use. So I think a wonderful and easy integration framework is time better spent that redoing something already well done on other languages. Object are for reuse, but we try to rebuild... And on top of the framework, lot of smalltalk classes for an easy usage of the outside work already done. Obviously, all I said is not valid if Smalltalk is considered only an experimental language or a playground, but this was, and probably still is, the place for Squeak. If I remember well, Pharo was born for industrial grade application... Sorry for this rant, but I liked Smalltalk from day one, the day I read the famous Byte's article, and still try to understand why it's not the number one language, but I think we, as a community, did a lot on the wrong direction. BTW: I still like Smalltalk a lot and really appreciate the work done by all of the Smalltalk communities. again, have a wonderful year giorgio On Fri, Jan 3, 2020 at 4:55 PM Ramon Leon <ramon.l...@allresnet.com> wrote: > On 2020-01-02 10:56 a.m., Sean P. DeNigris wrote: > > While I dream of a world where everything is in-image as pure Smalltalk, > > given the reality of limited manpower, I think of outside library use as > a > > way to "cheat" and get a lot more from that limited engineering resource. > > Agree, I've used the original Markdown.pl implementation for years same as > I would any other shell script, via OSProcess > > markdown: someContent > ^UnixProcess pipeString: someContent throughCommand: (FileDirectory > default fullPathFor: 'Markdown.pl') > > Never saw a need to rewrite what already works in its original form. > > -- > Ramón León > VP of Technology > Alliance Reservations Network > >
