[Pharo-users] Re: How do I unsubscribe?

[Hedley Finger]

Thanks James. I usually only look at the header details when I suspect the
sender is a scammer. You learn something new every day.

Regards,
Hedley

Hedley Finger
hedley.fin...@gmail.com


On Wed, 18 Jan 2023, 11:14 James Foster,  wrote:

> Hi Hedley,
>
> If you look at the raw source for the email, it includes the following
> lines in the header:
>
> Reply-To: Any question about pharo is welcome  >
> Subject: [Pharo-users] How do I unsubscribe?
> List-Id: Any question about pharo is welcome 
> List-Archive: <
> https://lists.pharo.org/archives/list/pharo-users@lists.pharo.org/>
> List-Help:  >
> List-Owner:  >
> List-Post:  >
> List-Subscribe:  >
> List-Unsubscribe:  >
>
> So, it appears that pharo-users-le...@lists.pharo.org is correct.
>
> James
>
> On Jan 17, 2023, at 2:18 PM, Hedley Finger 
> wrote:
>
> I can't find any info at the Affinity list-server about unsubscribing from
> this list. Presumably there is a special address but I can't think what
> command to add after pharo-users-???. TIA.
>
> Hedley Finger
> hedley.fin...@gmail.com
>
>
>
>

[Pharo-users] Re: How do I unsubscribe?

[James Foster]

Hi Hedley,

If you look at the raw source for the email, it includes the following lines in 
the header:

Reply-To: Any question about pharo is welcome 
Subject: [Pharo-users] How do I unsubscribe?
List-Id: Any question about pharo is welcome 
List-Archive: 

List-Help: 
List-Owner: 
List-Post: 
List-Subscribe: 
List-Unsubscribe: 

So, it appears that pharo-users-le...@lists.pharo.org 
 is correct.

James

> On Jan 17, 2023, at 2:18 PM, Hedley Finger  wrote:
> 
> I can't find any info at the Affinity list-server about unsubscribing from 
> this list. Presumably there is a special address but I can't think what 
> command to add after pharo-users-???. TIA.
> 
> Hedley Finger
> hedley.fin...@gmail.com 
>

[Pharo-users] How do I unsubscribe?

[Hedley Finger]

I can't find any info at the Affinity list-server about unsubscribing from
this list. Presumably there is a special address but I can't think what
command to add after pharo-users-???. TIA.

Hedley Finger
hedley.fin...@gmail.com

[Pharo-users] Re: Sacrilegeous question : what are compelling use cases for Pharo

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

Hi Mayuresh,

I think that putting all the weight of a PhD the thesis in a particular 
phrase of the abstract, without looking the authors perspective about 
why he puts a particular origin on that place, it's not a good reading 
practice. So I'm glad that you will give the deep reading that this 
particular deep research deserves, particularly in a world where almost 
all introductions to computing environments are from the technical 
perspective (performance,  applications etc), so Maxwell's work is 
refreshing and needed.


Cheers,

Offray

On 17/01/23 1:23, mayur...@kathe.in via Pharo-users wrote:

Hi Offray,

Very kind of you to have shared links to the document: "Tracing the Dynabook".
That thesis is what I will definitely read through thoroughly, even though it 
weighs in at 300+ pages.
But, and a big but, I doubt the validity of the depth of research conducted by 
John W Maxwell.
In the opening sentences of his abstract, he errs by stating that:
The origins of the personal computer are found in an educational vision. 
Desktop computing
and multimedia were not first conceived as tools for office workers or media 
professionals—
they were prototyped as “personal dynamic media” for children.

Both of John Maxwell's statements above are "completely" brain-dead.
To begin with, the origins of the "personal" computer and therefore by extension, 
"desktop computing" were laid out by the team of Dr Douglas Englebart at SRI and was 
brilliantly presented in his demonstration in 1968.
Dr Douglas Englebart conceived of his Online System (NLS) at SRI for the explicit need of 
"knowledge workers", a term later on stolen by Mr Steve Jobs.
Also, in case you haven't known, Mr Alan Kay worked as a non-core member of Dr 
Englebart's team, before being poached by Xerox for PARC.
If I am not wrong, Mr Alan Kay, back then, was just an intern at SRI.
Also, I give full credit to Mr Alan Kay for conceiving a message-passing based 
programming system which morphed into Smalltalk, and even more, I am in awe of 
Mr Dan Ingalls for having implemented large sections of it, using the crude 
tools of his day.

I assure you that I will overlook that fundamental flaw in John Maxwell's 
premise and plow through his entire thesis.

Again, thanks for sharing details regarding John Maxwell's thesis, as well as 
writing-in your mail outlining the benefits of engaging with Smalltalk/Pharo.

Best regards,

~Mayuresh


On Tuesday, January 17, 2023 06:32 AM IST, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas 
 wrote:
  

Hi Mayuresh,

To add a little bit to the excellent answers thread, I would emphasize
that the important thing is effectively the how and not the what,
despite of some languages excelling at some particular contexts (for
example JavaScript being part of the de-facto emergent glued together
under pressure "standard"  for the Web with HTML and CSS being the other
two parts of the Manticore) or that, at some point, several of us have
listened that all languages being Turing complete are equivalent in such
nerdy metric and capable of the same "what", but definitively not of the
same how. Even authors like Maxwell in Tracing the Dynabook[1], said
that comparing Smalltalk with other computer languages (like Ruby or
Python) instead of computer environments misses the point and that a
more convenient comparison would be between the Dynabook tradition and
the Unix tradition.

[1]
https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/grafoscopedia/uv/#Tracing%20the%20Dynabook

In the case of Pharo and Smalltalk, I feel them pretty empowering as a
way of conceiving computing, where environment, language, tools, apps,
conform an explorable/modifiable continuum, instead of all the
indirection layers common in the Unix paradigm. This have allow us in
the local community to address a set of projects in a pretty different a
more agile way to what could be done in languages like Python under Unix
(and I tried that combination before confirming my definitive bet for
Smalltalk like/inspired metasystems).  As a consequence, we have been
able to enable grassroots innovation in several topics that fall under
the umbrella of civic tech, including: performative writing and
(re)publishing, agile data storytelling and visualization, data
feminism, civic hacktivism, reproducible research, making "Big Data"
approachable,  hypertextual resilient community and interpersonal memory
and presences, among other topics (see our portfolio at [2]).

[2] https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/offray-blog/uv/bliki/#Portfolio

Even when Pharo/Smalltalk are not suited for every context, you can
combine them with external tools (for example when some functionality is
not implemented in Pharo or for performance reasons). We have being
doing that with Nim language, Lua, Pandoc with pretty good results. So
you can be as agile as you need and rely on external tools when needed.
Pharo is not only a innovative place/tech with a welcoming, vibrant and
responding community, but also is becoming a good team player wi

[Pharo-users] Re: Sacrilegeous question : what are compelling use cases for Pharo

[Richard O'Keefe]

Much sympathy for your life situation.
Most of the Smalltalk code I personally develop is developed using a
classic text
editor, is batch compiled, and runs headless.  Smalltalk is *STILL* an
amazing language
without the "addictive" IDE.  (In fact the more "conventional" Smalltalk
systems I use
have sufficiently different IDEs that I experience considerable friction
using the IDE.)

I'm on the fringes of the High Performance Computing world.  This is quite
dramatically
different from most programming, and in some interesting ways.  The
dominant languages
are Fortran, C, and C++ with extensions such as OpenMP and OpenACC and of
course "transport"
layers like MPI.  These languages have *serious* optimising compilers
working hard to get
the best out of vectorised instructions, GPUs, even FPGAs, and clusters.
There are also
dialects like SYCL and Cilk.  As an example of the kind of application,
consider the
COVID epidemiological model developed by Neil Ferguson's team in the UK,
which was very
influential in setting UK government policy (lockdowns).  This is about 10
000 SLOC of
C++ with much use of OpenMP for parallelism.  This isn't "bet your
business" software;
this is "bet your whole ECONOMY" software.  It is, in the 1970s sense,
"structured".  It
is, in the peculiarly C++ sense, "object oriented".  And it is very hard
for me to
figure out what is going on (despite having tracked C++ since cfront days).

What does this have to do with Smalltalk?

First, Smalltalk is not an HPC language.  If you want to develop
computationally
demanding code, you might prototype it in Smalltalk, but you are not going
to deploy.

Second, that doesn't necessarily preclude the use of Smalltalk in HPC
environments.
People seriously use Python (despite Python's single-thread slowness),
Matlab, and
R for HPC problems.  What they do is wrap Fortran/C/C++ data structures and
call
Fortran/C/C++ code to manipulate them, basically using Python or Matlab or
whatever
to direct the low level code.

Third, just imagine the fun of debugging code like this.  You don't really
want to
write Fortran (even Fortran'08) or C++ (even C++17) by hand; it's ok as
"portable
parallel assembler".

Fourth, in order to configure and customise software like this, you really
want
a decent interactive modelling language.  (For example, the CovidSim
program uses
data loaded *once* from WorldPop.  I haven't yet found anything in the
distribution
to update this.)

Fifth, there's the whole "Embedded Domain-Specific Language" thing.  There
has been
some impressive work done on generating low level code inside functinoal
programming
languages.

Thus I hypothesise that there is room for Smalltalk as a tool for
*generating* and
configuring HPC code.

My main worry is that when it comes to "bet your whole economy" software and
worse still, "bet the entire global economy and human happiness for
centuries"
software like climate models, it's appropriate to use the very highest
quality
assurance tools practical, including *serious* verification.  That's not
common
practice.  CovidSim has 'assert' statements in just two files.  Generation
via
Smalltalk wouldn't be *worse*.  But could it be *better* ?

What is the state of the art in verification tools
 - written in Smalltalk?
 - available (via FFI or otherwise) *through* Smalltalk?
 - available in any form *for* Smalltalk?

(I should probably be looking at MOOSE but am too stupid to know how to
start.)

On Sun, 15 Jan 2023 at 19:11, mayur...@kathe.in via Pharo-users <
pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> In response to my email below, I received 5 interesting responses. I thank
> those people for writing-in.
>
> Here is my take on what I've understood and why I am still hesitant to go
> along.
> My comments on those responses are further below, but, at the moment, let
> me explain my situation.
>
> I am a 46 year-old who has been programming computers since the age of 16.
> I used to be a highly sought-after programmer till the year 2000, when due
> to circumstances beyond my control, my life and career got destroyed
> completely.
> In fact, I was so highly valued, that in spite of me being from India, I
> was pursued by Verizon US.
> I am now confined to my home (mostly) and I have very little to do, in the
> past 12 years I have not programmed anything beyond a basic prime-number
> tester and a fibonacci-sequence generator in C.
> I am getting my life back in order and I need some occupation, though, not
> necessarily one from which I would demand financial returns.
> I have been dilly-dallying on a decision, primarily because I am unable to
> take a call on whether to pursue my love for the low-level (x64 assembler +
> Forth) or the extremely high-level (work involving reasoning using symbolic
> inference) using a Smalltalk (either Squeak or Pharo).
>
> The above is not meant to elicit sympathy, but has been tacked-in just to
> give potential advisers an idea about my state.
>
> Onward to my take on the re

[Pharo-users] Re: Sacrilegeous question : what are compelling use cases for Pharo

[Richard O'Keefe]

Back when I was a University lecturer, I sometimes amused myself by
rewriting student (or other
staff!) Java code in Smalltalk.  I generally got about a factor of 6
smaller.  Of course, that
was before Java 8, which copied blocks and higher-order collection methods
from Smalltalk.

On Sat, 14 Jan 2023 at 21:01, mayur...@kathe.in via Pharo-users <
pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> This isn't a mail intended to troll this community.
>
> I am genuinely curious about what would be the type of use cases which
> would be exemplary for Pharo?
>
> Now-a-days, anything one could have accomplished solely with Smalltalk
> (and hence Pharo) can be accomplished with a number of modern programming
> languages and their associated frameworks, e.g. Google's Dart with Flutter,
> Apple Swift with SwiftUI, Microsoft's C# with WinUI.
> And such languages and their associated frameworks are built from the
> ground-up for a particular platform, while Pharo does not have any such
> targets, which usually renders graphical applications built using Pharo to
> "look like" aliens.
>
> What does stand-out regarding Smalltalk (and hence Pharo) is the superior
> developer experience furnished as a result of the true object system
> combined with a full graphical environment.
> In addition to that, Pharo, specifically, provides advanced tools like Git
> integration, etc.
>
> But, are these things all that there are to be considered enough for
> highlighting the full inherent power of Pharo?
>
> Again, apologies if anyone found the subject line as well as the message
> body to be troll-ish. That has not been the intent.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> ~Mayuresh
>