[squeak-dev] [Pharo-users] Personal Programming onPharo

H. Hirzel hannes.hirzel at gmail.com
Tue May 8 18:06:08 UTC 2018


On 5/6/18, Trygve Reenskaug <trygver at ifi.uio.no> wrote:
> I'm working on a programing paradigm and IDE for the personal programmer
> who wants to control his or her IoT. The size of the target audience I
> have in mind is >100 million. I gave up Squeak long ago as a platform
> because they obsolete my code faster than I can write it.  I have now
> frozen Squeak 3.10.2 and hope its runtime will survive until I find a
> better foundation. My hope is that Pharo has a stable kernel that I can
> build on.

Hello Tryge

Good to see that you reconsider to use Smalltalk in 2018, this time Pharo.

Am I assuming correctly that you want to continue to work on your IDE
which the supports the DCI (Data-Context-Interaction) programming
style [1]? The IDE was called "BabyIDE" [2].

In 2015 you wrote to the Squeak mailing  list that you are abandoning
Squeak (Squeak 3.8, 4.5 or 4.6 at that time and Smalltalk as a whole)
in favour of JavaScript, a mainstream language. That you now at least
reconsider to use Smalltalk (Pharo) is an interesting result as it
reinforces the idea that doing things the Smalltalk way is more
promising than going for JavaScript directly [6].

As for loading the BabyIDE into Squeak: It is noteworthy that after 10
years (done around Squeak version 3.8) of maintaining a fork the
Squeakland (Etoys) image has been merged back into Squeak 6.0a trunk.
[5]

I could actually load some of your tools last year into Squeak 6.0a
with very modest fixes last year. [2].

It seems that splitting your IDE enhancements into different parts
which can be treated independently will probably help.

And in addition helpful would be  IMHO to write HOW you construct
these tools and WHY you do it. These will help people to maintain your
code even if the underlying system changes.

It seems worthwhile to try out how it goes with the most recent Squeak
version, Squeak 6.0a trunk [8].

Another option is to wait a few months and look for the bootstrap
version of Pharo 7.
All the code is in readable format on github and various types of
image files may be built  build from it [7].

And the third option is to check out if Cuis (the third Smalltalk
which runs on the OpenSmalltalk [3] VM) suits your needs. [4]


Kind regards

Hannes Hirzel


-------------------

[1] Data-Context-Interaction http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6048
[2] BabySRE http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2550
[3] http://www.opensmalltalk.org/
[4] Cuis Smalltalk
https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev ; there is a Cuis
mailing list.
[5] Etoys in 2017 http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6531
[6] Of course these days JavaScript cannot be avoided. But it is
preferable to generate it with a Smalltalk tool.
[7] The file format used in Pharo 7 is called Tonel (no exclamation marks!)
[8] Squeak 6.0a trunk download http://files.squeak.org/6.0alpha/


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