Re: [Pharo-users] Exploring Pier
Hola Offray, Thanks for the positive reply. I was hoping you wouldn't take anything I wrote negatively. On 10/13/2015 12:20 PM, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote: Hi Jimmie, On 05/10/15 09:16, Jimmie Houchin wrote: Hello Offray, My apologies for the delay in reply. I have been on holiday. No problem. I'm not as proactive as I would like on this community. I'm trying to gain time/knowledge to contribute more, but there are pending answers from me on interesting topics, so thanks for taking your time to answer. I have grouped your answer in two parts: Pharo related and other tools related. More comments below. Correct. Thanks for the suggestions. I am pretty much wanting to stick with Pharo solutions. I want to use and contribute to the Pharo ecosystem. I believe the more we use our own tools and contribute toward the ecosystem the better our tools and the ecosystem will be. In Pharo I can possibly offer an occasional bug fix, contribute to documentation or tests. [...] In Pharo I have Pharo/Smalltalk. Even a simple user can often contribute in simple ways. Even as a simple user of a Pharo tool. I can submit issues, fix simple issues, improve method or class comments, etc. As I learn the Pharo tools and ecosystem I continually improve my ability to take care of myself and also contribute to the community. I think Pharo is the most user empowering environment I have found. I agree with you. I share your vision of Smalltalk as the most empowering environment I have used. First time we meet (vía EToys, Scratch, BotsInc) I felt in love, but weren't ready for each other and took almost 10 years and Pharo to bring me back (kind of a bittersweet love story). I'm a simple user, but in this last year after returning back I have made stuff I just thought/dream about in other environments. Still a lot of things to learn and rookie code and practice, but I'm improving faster that in any other environment, despite of having not as much time to practice as I would like. Even prototyping is faster... a lot faster. I understand your journey. I too have been a part of this community and Squeak for a long time. However, between what capabilities Squeak/Pharo had and my skill set and project requirements, I have at times had to look elsewhere. Some things require the ability to use external libraries. This sometimes requires skills which I don't have or the current state of FFI/NB isn't friendly for people like me. But I think over time Pharo is becoming more capable and hopefully at some point its interoperability will improve as well. If you have the skills or can live with the few interoperability issues. I haven't found anything that I feel that is as empowering as Pharo. For me my project requirements have changed and I am no longer requiring the use of a proprietary C++/C library. I want to help Pharo too, by making it talk better with other/external ways of thinking/practicing computing. For example, after my talk with Serge about IPtyhon/Jupyter and Grafoscopio (my learning project) it was clearer to my that interactive documentation and data visualization was being bridged with objects via scripting (thanks to embedded playground in the document tree). So you can start thinking in a more "emergent way": documents and scripts instead of a hierarchy of objects and messages, and then go from your scripts in documents to more objectual forms as you clear your mind about the problem. This practice/thinking was far away ten years ago for grown ups in Etoys, BotsInc, as also happened with documentation (they happen elsewhere and not inside the image). I am not sure I understand what you are trying to do here with Jupyter and Grafoscopio. I think Jupyter is exceptionally nice if you are doing Python. I have used it both with Python and Julia. But I don't see why or for what I would use it for if I have a much superior, IMO, live environment in Pharo. Jupyter is a nice option to command line or repl Python. But Pharo (Smalltalk's) image environment is so much more than anything offered easily anywhere else. And yes, the other solutions do offer that as well as they are open source. But the bar is much higher. I now have to understand their ecosystems, languages, and development cultures of a variety of tools. [...] Sure I can find lots and lots of other quality tools in other languages. But each is their own island. And depending on how broadly I spread the net. Different languages, different cultures, different licenses, all independent of each other. [...] I much prefer the Pharo ecosystem and culture. It is home. I know others who like the other tools, and multiplicity of choice. And they feel comfortable there. I prefer Pharo too. I have felt the "red pill" effect talked several times in the Pharo/Smalltalk culture. You just need to enter the matrix sometimes to awake others :-), which means that you share their
Re: [Pharo-users] Exploring Pier
Hi Jimmie, On 05/10/15 09:16, Jimmie Houchin wrote: Hello Offray, My apologies for the delay in reply. I have been on holiday. No problem. I'm not as proactive as I would like on this community. I'm trying to gain time/knowledge to contribute more, but there are pending answers from me on interesting topics, so thanks for taking your time to answer. I have grouped your answer in two parts: Pharo related and other tools related. More comments below. Thanks for the suggestions. I am pretty much wanting to stick with Pharo solutions. I want to use and contribute to the Pharo ecosystem. I believe the more we use our own tools and contribute toward the ecosystem the better our tools and the ecosystem will be. In Pharo I can possibly offer an occasional bug fix, contribute to documentation or tests. [...] In Pharo I have Pharo/Smalltalk. Even a simple user can often contribute in simple ways. Even as a simple user of a Pharo tool. I can submit issues, fix simple issues, improve method or class comments, etc. As I learn the Pharo tools and ecosystem I continually improve my ability to take care of myself and also contribute to the community. I think Pharo is the most user empowering environment I have found. I agree with you. I share your vision of Smalltalk as the most empowering environment I have used. First time we meet (vía EToys, Scratch, BotsInc) I felt in love, but weren't ready for each other and took almost 10 years and Pharo to bring me back (kind of a bittersweet love story). I'm a simple user, but in this last year after returning back I have made stuff I just thought/dream about in other environments. Still a lot of things to learn and rookie code and practice, but I'm improving faster that in any other environment, despite of having not as much time to practice as I would like. Even prototyping is faster... a lot faster. I want to help Pharo too, by making it talk better with other/external ways of thinking/practicing computing. For example, after my talk with Serge about IPtyhon/Jupyter and Grafoscopio (my learning project) it was clearer to my that interactive documentation and data visualization was being bridged with objects via scripting (thanks to embedded playground in the document tree). So you can start thinking in a more "emergent way": documents and scripts instead of a hierarchy of objects and messages, and then go from your scripts in documents to more objectual forms as you clear your mind about the problem. This practice/thinking was far away ten years ago for grown ups in Etoys, BotsInc, as also happened with documentation (they happen elsewhere and not inside the image). And yes, the other solutions do offer that as well as they are open source. But the bar is much higher. I now have to understand their ecosystems, languages, and development cultures of a variety of tools. [...] Sure I can find lots and lots of other quality tools in other languages. But each is their own island. And depending on how broadly I spread the net. Different languages, different cultures, different licenses, all independent of each other. [...] I much prefer the Pharo ecosystem and culture. It is home. I know others who like the other tools, and multiplicity of choice. And they feel comfortable there. I prefer Pharo too. I have felt the "red pill" effect talked several times in the Pharo/Smalltalk culture. You just need to enter the matrix sometimes to awake others :-), which means that you share their reality for a while to teach them you can bend the rules or have super powers after taking the red pill. But you need to enter the matrix to offer them the red pill. My way to enter the matrix and made that offer is via interactive documentation, scripting and data visualization, because this juncture appeals a lot of people beyond programmers (like myself). The way I want to use to evade the complexities of other technologies, idiosyncrasies and cultures is try to talk only with the backend (storage formats/schemas) and frontend (these days mostly html). But I want to use what I already have and know to make that bridge. Put Pharo/Smalltalk in the existing practices and technologies in a symbiotic approach (or something like the assimilation of of star trek's cyborgs, until "resistance is futile", to follow with SciFi images :-) ). I have blogged recently about a specific case for this approach here: http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/2015-10-06-grav-nikola-both Choice is nice. Pharo is mine. :-)+3 to follow Sthepharo and Doru. Thanks again for suggestions and for a view on how others approach problems and their solutions. That is always available as inspiration even within Pharo. I take a look at your stuff. Nice to help. Cheers, Offray
Re: [Pharo-users] Exploring Pier
In Pharo I have Pharo/Smalltalk. Even a simple user can often contribute in simple ways. Even as a simple user of a Pharo tool. I can submit issues, fix simple issues, improve method or class comments, etc. As I learn the Pharo tools and ecosystem I continually improve my ability to take care of myself and also contribute to the community. I think Pharo is the most user empowering environment I have found. Sure I can find lots and lots of other quality tools in other languages. But each is their own island. And depending on how broadly I spread the net. Different languages, different cultures, different licenses, all independent of each other. I much prefer the Pharo ecosystem and culture. It is home. I know others who like the other tools, and multiplicity of choice. And they feel comfortable there. Choice is nice. Pharo is mine. :) Thanks again for suggestions and for a view on how others approach problems and their solutions. That is always available as inspiration even within Pharo. I take a look at your stuff. Jimmie On 09/28/2015 09:03 AM, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote: Hi Jimmie, Some or your searches/needs seem similar to mine. So I will share some of the stuff I'm using or considering, which is not Pharo/Smalltalk related and how I plan to connect it with Pharo. On markup language and documentation I'm using pandoc[1], which covers a wide variety of formats (including Html and LaTeX, like Pillar) and works on Windows, Gnu/Linux and Mac with a pretty portable installation. I use Zotero[2] integration vía BibTeX and Citezen[3] using Grafoscopio[4], a custom made Pharo interactive documentation system I'm building to learn smalltalk. On the website generation, I was a user/promoter of web2py[5] for several year, but recently I'm migrating towards static site genetators like Nikola[6] and Grav[7] because I don't need any much else for my web presence. [1] http://pandoc.org/ [2] https://www.zotero.org/ [3] http://vst.ensm-douai.fr/ESUG2009Media/uploads/1/citezen-EsugAwards2009.pdf [4] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~Offray/Grafoscopio [5] http://web2py.com/ [6] https://getnikola.com/ [7] http://getgrav.org/ My idea is to build an interface from Grafoscopio to this non-pharo technologies like static web site generators, so you can use the interactivity of Pharo/Smalltalk, without having to reinvent the wheel all the time (at least for wheels yo don't care about). I'm trying to find the knowledge/time to put this ideas into practice. Maybe you can consider some of these in your initial overview of the problem and the solutions. Cheers, Offray On 22/09/15 11:30, Jimmie Houchin wrote: I know there are options to Pier. To a certain extent part of the purpose of my email was to explore whether or not Pier is a viable option and if it has community support that I am not easily seeing. I want to stick with reasonably well supported options. I thought the cms and blog parts of Pier looked interesting. This is all personal and not for business or public. I definitely want to learn Pillar as it is required if at some point I want to contribute to any of the documentation. And it looks like a pretty powerful tool. I do not have any clearly defined goals which make Pier a requirement. The blog and cms like features are possibly reasonably implementable in the more currently supported options. And those are simply things I am exploring not requiring. It seems that Doru possibly uses it on the http://www.humane-assessment.com/blog site. Thanks. Jimmie On 09/22/2015 02:38 AM, Damien Cassou wrote: Hi, Jimmie Houchinwrites: I am interested in learning to use Pier. I browsed the mailing list to learn about current status and documentation. It seems to be pretty quiet on the mailing lists. There seems to be some activity on Smalltalkhub on Pier3. Pillar, the document model and parser of Pier is alive. I need help but the project is definitely not dead as we use it for all books we are writing. The rest of Pier, mainly the web interface, looks rather dead for me as well. Why are you interested in Pier? We might help you find other projects that could suit your needs.
Re: [Pharo-users] Exploring Pier
Hello Offray, My apologies for the delay in reply. I have been on holiday. Thanks for the suggestions. I am pretty much wanting to stick with Pharo solutions. I want to use and contribute to the Pharo ecosystem. I believe the more we use our own tools and contribute toward the ecosystem the better our tools and the ecosystem will be. In Pharo I can possibly offer an occasional bug fix, contribute to documentation or tests. And yes, the other solutions do offer that as well as they are open source. But the bar is much higher. I now have to understand their ecosystems, languages, and development cultures of a variety of tools. In Pharo I have Pharo/Smalltalk. Even a simple user can often contribute in simple ways. Even as a simple user of a Pharo tool. I can submit issues, fix simple issues, improve method or class comments, etc. As I learn the Pharo tools and ecosystem I continually improve my ability to take care of myself and also contribute to the community. I think Pharo is the most user empowering environment I have found. Sure I can find lots and lots of other quality tools in other languages. But each is their own island. And depending on how broadly I spread the net. Different languages, different cultures, different licenses, all independent of each other. I much prefer the Pharo ecosystem and culture. It is home. I know others who like the other tools, and multiplicity of choice. And they feel comfortable there. Choice is nice. Pharo is mine. Thanks again for suggestions and for a view on how others approach problems and their solutions. That is always available as inspiration even within Pharo. I take a look at your stuff. Jimmie On 09/28/2015 09:03 AM, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote: Hi Jimmie, Some or your searches/needs seem similar to mine. So I will share some of the stuff I'm using or considering, which is not Pharo/Smalltalk related and how I plan to connect it with Pharo. On markup language and documentation I'm using pandoc[1], which covers a wide variety of formats (including Html and LaTeX, like Pillar) and works on Windows, Gnu/Linux and Mac with a pretty portable installation. I use Zotero[2] integration vía BibTeX and Citezen[3] using Grafoscopio[4], a custom made Pharo interactive documentation system I'm building to learn smalltalk. On the website generation, I was a user/promoter of web2py[5] for several year, but recently I'm migrating towards static site genetators like Nikola[6] and Grav[7] because I don't need any much else for my web presence. [1] http://pandoc.org/ [2] https://www.zotero.org/ [3] http://vst.ensm-douai.fr/ESUG2009Media/uploads/1/citezen-EsugAwards2009.pdf [4] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~Offray/Grafoscopio [5] http://web2py.com/ [6] https://getnikola.com/ [7] http://getgrav.org/ My idea is to build an interface from Grafoscopio to this non-pharo technologies like static web site generators, so you can use the interactivity of Pharo/Smalltalk, without having to reinvent the wheel all the time (at least for wheels yo don't care about). I'm trying to find the knowledge/time to put this ideas into practice. Maybe you can consider some of these in your initial overview of the problem and the solutions. Cheers, Offray On 22/09/15 11:30, Jimmie Houchin wrote: I know there are options to Pier. To a certain extent part of the purpose of my email was to explore whether or not Pier is a viable option and if it has community support that I am not easily seeing. I want to stick with reasonably well supported options. I thought the cms and blog parts of Pier looked interesting. This is all personal and not for business or public. I definitely want to learn Pillar as it is required if at some point I want to contribute to any of the documentation. And it looks like a pretty powerful tool. I do not have any clearly defined goals which make Pier a requirement. The blog and cms like features are possibly reasonably implementable in the more currently supported options. And those are simply things I am exploring not requiring. It seems that Doru possibly uses it on the http://www.humane-assessment.com/blog site. Thanks. Jimmie On 09/22/2015 02:38 AM, Damien Cassou wrote: Hi, Jimmie Houchinwrites: I am interested in learning to use Pier. I browsed the mailing list to learn about current status and documentation. It seems to be pretty quiet on the mailing lists. There seems to be some activity on Smalltalkhub on Pier3. Pillar, the document model and parser of Pier is alive. I need help but the project is definitely not dead as we use it for all books we are writing. The rest of Pier, mainly the web interface, looks rather dead for me as well. Why are you interested in Pier? We might help you find other projects that could suit your needs.
Re: [Pharo-users] Exploring Pier
Jimmie Houchinwrites: > I definitely want to learn Pillar as it is required if at some point I > want to contribute to any of the documentation. And it looks like a > pretty powerful tool. indeed > I do not have any clearly defined goals which make Pier a requirement. > The blog and cms like features are possibly reasonably implementable > in the more currently supported options. And those are simply things I > am exploring not requiring. you might want to use Pillar directly to generate a static website and add some dynamic plugins (such as Disqus for the comments). Ecstatic (https://github.com/guillep/ecstatic) goes in that direction. -- Damien Cassou http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without losing enthusiasm." --Winston Churchill
Re: [Pharo-users] Exploring Pier
On 09/23/2015 02:59 AM, Damien Cassou wrote: Jimmie Houchinwrites: I definitely want to learn Pillar as it is required if at some point I want to contribute to any of the documentation. And it looks like a pretty powerful tool. indeed I do not have any clearly defined goals which make Pier a requirement. The blog and cms like features are possibly reasonably implementable in the more currently supported options. And those are simply things I am exploring not requiring. you might want to use Pillar directly to generate a static website and add some dynamic plugins (such as Disqus for the comments). Ecstatic (https://github.com/guillep/ecstatic) goes in that direction. Thanks for the information. I briefly had that thought about static generation yesterday. But did not have any thoughts for comments. I give that a look. Thanks. Jimmie
Re: [Pharo-users] Exploring Pier
I know there are options to Pier. To a certain extent part of the purpose of my email was to explore whether or not Pier is a viable option and if it has community support that I am not easily seeing. I want to stick with reasonably well supported options. I thought the cms and blog parts of Pier looked interesting. This is all personal and not for business or public. I definitely want to learn Pillar as it is required if at some point I want to contribute to any of the documentation. And it looks like a pretty powerful tool. I do not have any clearly defined goals which make Pier a requirement. The blog and cms like features are possibly reasonably implementable in the more currently supported options. And those are simply things I am exploring not requiring. It seems that Doru possibly uses it on the http://www.humane-assessment.com/blog site. Thanks. Jimmie On 09/22/2015 02:38 AM, Damien Cassou wrote: Hi, Jimmie Houchinwrites: I am interested in learning to use Pier. I browsed the mailing list to learn about current status and documentation. It seems to be pretty quiet on the mailing lists. There seems to be some activity on Smalltalkhub on Pier3. Pillar, the document model and parser of Pier is alive. I need help but the project is definitely not dead as we use it for all books we are writing. The rest of Pier, mainly the web interface, looks rather dead for me as well. Why are you interested in Pier? We might help you find other projects that could suit your needs.
Re: [Pharo-users] Exploring Pier
On 21-09-15 23:44, Jimmie Houchin wrote: Hello, I am interested in learning to use Pier. I browsed the mailing list to learn about current status and documentation. It seems to be pretty quiet on the mailing lists. There seems to be some activity on Smalltalkhub on Pier3. I am interested to see how well supported Pier is (is going to be). And if Pier is still active in the community. Is there any current documentation and where? Thanks for any help and opinions regarding Pier and its current and future situation. We run a few pier sites, one of which uses bootstrap. The configuration of pier needs updating to no longer track the (incompatible) changes in pillar. Apart from that it is very stable. Not all of the add-ons are up to date. We run the sites so, that they monitor a package cache directory and load newer versions of the site automatically, so we can just do a git push to update. Stephan
Re: [Pharo-users] Exploring Pier
Hi, Jimmie Houchinwrites: > I am interested in learning to use Pier. I browsed the mailing list to > learn about current status and documentation. It seems to be pretty > quiet on the mailing lists. > > There seems to be some activity on Smalltalkhub on Pier3. Pillar, the document model and parser of Pier is alive. I need help but the project is definitely not dead as we use it for all books we are writing. The rest of Pier, mainly the web interface, looks rather dead for me as well. Why are you interested in Pier? We might help you find other projects that could suit your needs. -- Damien Cassou http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without losing enthusiasm." --Winston Churchill
Re: [Pharo-users] Exploring Pier
I don't know the answer but I am really interested to read it. Hernán 2015-09-21 18:44 GMT-03:00 Jimmie Houchin: > Hello, > > I am interested in learning to use Pier. I browsed the mailing list to > learn about current status and documentation. It seems to be pretty quiet > on the mailing lists. > > There seems to be some activity on Smalltalkhub on Pier3. > > I am interested to see how well supported Pier is (is going to be). > > And if Pier is still active in the community. Is there any current > documentation and where? > > Thanks for any help and opinions regarding Pier and its current and future > situation. > > Jimmie > >