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

[Stewart MacLean]

^ThumbsUpEmoji new display

On Sun, Jan 15, 2023 at 11:30 PM Tomaž Turk  wrote:

> Hi Mayuresh,
>
> I think that the choice of what programming language one needs to learn or
> use depends today from the goals that you have - and these goals are not
> only tied to specifiic business projects that you (might) pursue but also
> career and self-enrichment missions. Years ago we had programmers who did
> their entire career by knowing and using only one language, however this is
> nowadays almost impossible, in general.
>
> As others already nicely put, Pharo and Smalltalk are, also in my own
> expeirence, the most beautiful and productive programming languages and
> environments. What would be the type of use cases which would be exemplary
> for Pharo? Well, I find Pharo to be a general programming language in its
> true meaning. You can grasp the diversity of what can be done by just
> looking at this list
> https://github.com/pharo-open-documentation/awesome-pharo. You can go
> close to the machine with uFFI and be very "declarative" with Glorp and
> similar packages. You'd like to do the data mining? No problem, except that
> everybody talks about Python and R.
>
> As MIS professor, I'm interested in new technologies, old technolgies in
> new settings, always looking for the best ways to do research about and to
> teach modern concepts, also challenging myself with real, "production"
> cases from the field. Once I learnt the Smalltalk way, the challenges for
> me with Pharo were mostly the following:
> - For a specific project, you sooner or later bump into a missing
> functionality in some package or other. Here, it's true that you can
> relatively easy see the inner structures of these packages and add the
> functionality that you need. The challenge here is grasping the
> architecture model and development patterns that the original contrubutors
> and the community already "engraved" into the package, trying to understand
> it and to follow the same patterns - i.e. to participate in a constructive
> manner. My case: PharoWin32 and PharoCOM
> , I had to add the functionality
> that I needed to work on PharoADO .
> - There is a constant lag of documentation publishing activities which
> cannot follow the actual development; typical examples that I stumbled
> across are Pharo Spec2 book (but it can be "replaced" by excellent Spec
> Handbook
> ),
> the second one the deeper settings of Seaside framework that I needed for
> production environment.
>
> For these challenges, you can always count on really helpful community,
> however it is time consuming and eats away the positive side of
> productivity gains that are brought by the language itself.
>
> So, if you need some occupation, not necessarily one from which you would
> demand financial returns as you put, I suggest that you choose a couple of
> small projects just to try it out and see what happens. Pharo is a heavy
> addition to one's self-enrichment in the sense of not learning the tools
> but learning the concepts and "the big picture". Nice examples are the book 
> Learning
> Object-Oriented Programming, Design and TDD  and 
> Pharo
> MOOC . If you pursue into more serious projects
> (research or productionwise), the community would be grateful.
>
> Best wishes,
> Tomaz
>
>

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

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

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 with other 
tech ecosystems and tools.


Hope this helps,

Offray



On 15/01/23 5:30, Tomaž Turk wrote:

Hi Mayuresh,

I think that the choice of what programming language one needs to 
learn or use depends today from the goals that you have - and these 
goals are not only tied to specifiic business projects that you 
(might) pursue but also career and self-enrichment missions. Years ago 
we had programmers who did their entire career by knowing and using 
only one language, however this is nowadays almost impossible, in general.


As others already nicely put, Pharo and Smalltalk are, also in my own 
expeirence, the most beautiful and productive programming languages 
and environments. What would be the type of use cases which would be 
exemplary for Pharo? Well, I find Pharo to be a general programming 
language in its true meaning. You can grasp the diversity of what can 
be done by just looking at this list 
https://github.com/pharo-open-documentation/awesome-pharo. You can go 
close to the machine with uFFI and be very "declarative" with Glorp 
and similar packages. You'd like to do the data mining? No problem, 
except that everybody talks about Python and R.


As MIS professor, I'm interested in new technologies, old technolgies 
in new settings, always looking for the best ways to do research about 
and to teach modern concepts, also challenging myself with real, 
"production" cases from the field. Once I learnt the Smalltalk way, 
the challenges for me with Pharo were mostly the following:
- For a specific project, you sooner or later bump into a missing 
functionality in some package or other. Here, it's true that you can 
relatively easy see the inner structures of these packages and add the 
functionality that you need. The challenge here is grasping the 
architecture model and development patterns that the original 
contrubutors and the community already "engraved" into the package, 
trying to understand it and to follow the same patterns - i.e. to 
participate in a constructive manner. My case: PharoWin32 and PharoCOM 
, I had to add the functionality 
that I needed to work on PharoADO .
- There is a constant lag of documentation publishing activities which 
cannot follow the actual development; typical examples that I stumbled 
across are Pharo Spec2 book (but it can be "replaced" by excellent 
Spec Handbook 

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

[mayur...@kathe.in via Pharo-users]

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 with other
> tech ecosystems and tools.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> Offray
>
>
>
> On 15/01/23 5:30, Tomaž Turk wrote:
> > Hi Mayuresh,
> >
> > I think that the choice of what programming language one needs to
> > learn or use depends today from the goals that you have - and these
> > goals are not only tied to specifiic business projects that you
> > (might) pursue but also career and self-enrichment missions. Years ago
> > we had programmers who did their entire career by knowing and using
> > only one language, however this