Beginners April 2008

beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org

57 participants
43 discussions

Reading context from UnixProcess
by Jim O'Connor 09 Apr '08

09 Apr '08

I'm having trouble figuring out how to collect input from an externally executed linux process. The simple example below should, I think let me dump the contents of the directory /etc. The stream type returned by initialStdOut is AttachableFileStream. Sending the contents message to it generates a primitive error, caused I think because the stream's instance variable position turns out to be nil on inspection. p := UnixProcess command: 'ls -l /etc/' s := p initialStdOut s contents What am I doing wrong or missing? Better would be if someone has a simple code snippet the executes an external process and then accepts output from it asynchronously. Thanks. Jim

2 3

Newbie assortment
by Sven Schott 09 Apr '08

09 Apr '08

Hi I've recently become a Squeak lurker (that means I've downloaded the VM, several books, tutorials and done some basic tests but haven't taken the plunge...yet). I'm a Ruby user (not programmer) and I recently was introduced to Squeak via Croquet (It looked interesting). I was pretty wowed by Squeak (can you say 'Introspective Dynamic Objects Playground'?) but after some research I've come up with some questions: 1) I have to be honest here: is it alive? I have been to the website (seaside and squeak both have good sites by my standards) but apart from a few (good) projects I'm not seeing a hell of a lot from Squeak as a whole (see Q.3). I'm not abandoning Ruby (I love Ruby for many reasons) but I intend to really get into Smalltalk. I just want to know if the ship is sinking (or just temporarily stalled) before I board. 2) Can Squeak be used as the engine in enterprise with and without Seaside? What I mean is, can the VM run headless (is there such a status), as a service or in some fashion that does not require an account to be logged in? Forgive my ignorance, but I know very little about Squeak in terms of its capabilities. If my question is not relevant, how then is Squeak deployed in enterprise environments? I guess what I'm asking is the following: I currently deploy IT apps using Apache(serve static content and redirect dynamic pages), Mongrel/Rails/Ruby (Application service)) on Linux/OS X. Can I do the same with Squeak/Seaside? I've seen enterprise apps with Seaside but they may be on other Smalltalk VM/engines. 3) Is the community small? Big? Growing? Shrinking rapidly? What sites do people hang out at? I joined the list to see more of the community but I'd like to know the regular watering holes. 4) Is there any push or drive to making Squeak more mainstream. Well, mainstream is probably the wrong word. I just think that this thing is Gold. Really. Seriously. When I started using Ruby I thought 'Why aren't more people using this?'. That happened to be just a matter of time. But Squeak (and indeed smalltalk) has been around for a while. Why hasn't it shot up like a rocket? Is it because it IS viewed as a toy? I must admit that I did not think much of Squeak because I saw a screenshot of some toy-looking things on a screen and didn't think it could do anything serious (boy, was I wrong). Does it need marketing? More focus on business objects (I have fancy ideas about that but...) so that users and developers turn their heads? I don't know but maybe you do. Does it just need a killer app or killer promoter? Ruby was slowly gaining attention but Rails shoved it forward. I think Seaside has a lot more potential than Rails because it is sooooo cool. But is that just a Smalltalk thing? Will it just go the way of the dodo because the market decided that .NET was so good (it sucks. so. bad)? I'd hate to see that. At the moment, we use Microsoft Sharepoint for our document storage and I cannot express how absolutely crap that product is. I could write something better with Rails and I ain't a programmer(I can only imagine what could be done with Seaside). My place of employ uses it because we buy Microsoft. The. Worst. Reason. Ever. I know everyone does it. But it's @#$%*& wrong! I got my Rails apps in the door because I showed them I could write an app in a month that they didn't even think they could do. Maybe Squeak just needs a loud voice. I dunno. Anyhoo, I have more questions but I think I just wanted some opinions on these for the moment. Regards Sven Schott P.S. Any Squeakers in Australia?

6 8

I am a total beginner with some questions
by kennellgr 08 Apr '08

08 Apr '08

I really like programming (I've done some in C) and I decided I wanted to try doing some programming on my Mac. I spent hours online trying to find something that I could learn and settled on Squeak. I have it and barely understand the basics of it. A few Questions: 1. What do I do to test whether or not a key has been pressed (in a method I want it to say 'if C key is pressed down do this') 2. What do I do to display a picture that I have on my computer? -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/I-am-a-total-beginner-with-some-questions-tp16540965p… Sent from the Squeak - Beginners mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

3 2

Efficient date parsing
by stan shepherd 08 Apr '08

08 Apr '08

I have a large file with dates in the format '2001-11-04'. As I couldn't find a method to change to date, I'm doing: date := self dateFrom: (dateString subStrings: '-'). dateFrom: anArray "anArray should be like #('2005' '09' '06')" ^Date year: anArray first asInteger month: anArray second asInteger day: anArray third asInteger This works, but profiling shows half the work in loading the file is in dateFrom: Is there a more efficient way? Is there a standard method I've missed? Also, I tried to import the .cs of a date parser by Goran here; http://www.nabble.com/Parsing-dates%21-td10078517.html#a10078517 When I unpack the file, then click 'install' in the file list, I get a syntax error. How should I be loading this file? Thanks, ...Stan -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Efficient-date-parsing-tp16450393p16450393.html Sent from the Squeak - Beginners mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

5 10

The Blue Book on ACM
by cdrick 08 Apr '08

08 Apr '08

Hi For those interested, while looking for the blue book (out of print), I found that there is an online copy on ACM (of course, you need an account). I didn't know before, so here is the link for people like me: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=273&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=62857725… Cheers, Cédrick ps: I'll prefer a real copy but on amazon (france) it is about 130€ for a used one ;-) so I'll wait abit...

2 3

Misunderstanding Squeak
by Nathan Lane 08 Apr '08

08 Apr '08

So, as a beginner, I have noted the many things people have told me about Squeak, but one thing is really bugging me, and I can't break free of it. In my experience programming is a linear task, not object-based, so how do I program using Squeak which uses "active objects"? I don't understand. -- Nathan Lane Home, http://www.nathandelane.com Mirror, http://nathandelane.awardspace.com

9 14

Re: [Newbies] Misunderstanding Squeak
by Jared Hirsch 07 Apr '08

07 Apr '08

Maybe give the original smalltalk-80 blue book a try. There's a scan that is available at the squeak.org documentation page. The book is a marvel of technical exposition. It has quite a bit more code than squeak by example (not just toy code), and an excellent, comprehensive description of ALL the object classes in smalltalk-80. Believe it or not, it's a very readable language description. I think you'll find (or rather, I've found) that Smalltalk is a very subtly but systematically different language than, say, Java, where the OOP concept is only halfway expressed. OOP does not mean 'inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism', or anything like that: it's live objects exchanging messages, and everything's an object down to the VM. Simpler ideas and stronger metaphors allow you to produce better results faster and more intuitively; this is why Smalltalk's a great language for prototyping, even if the finished product has to be in some other language. You'll catch on after a while; just keep at it. ----- Original Message ---- From: Nathan Lane <nathamberlane(a)gmail.com> To: A friendly place to get answers to even the most basic questions about Squeak. <beginners(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org> Sent: Monday, April 7, 2008 4:13:21 PM Subject: Re: [Newbies] Misunderstanding Squeak I just realized that I need to clarify something else, I don't have difficulty "thinking in objects", I can do that just fine, as Java and C# have both taught me this extensively. I just don't understand how to use Squeak objects to develop a useful program. On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Nathan Lane <nathamberlane(a)gmail.com> wrote: You guys are hitting most of my problems. Here's the way I design a new project. First, naturally I find a problem, brainstorm the general solution to the problem, then I work on two separate pieces, the underlying functionality and the user interface, be it text-based or graphical or whatever. After that I will likely compile my first partial version, and test it to see if what I get is what I expected. If not, I'll review the compile/runtime error messages (stack traces) and attempt to remedy the problem. The are other instances in which I have taken on test-based programming, which involves designing the solution, writing unit tests, then writing the code for the unit tests, refactoring, writing more tests, and repeating the process until the solution is complete. I don't understand how these sorts of processes are accomplished in the object-based system called squeak. I understand that there is still source code...to some extent, or maybe always. And I understand the SmallTalk (Squeak) is a managed environment, i.e. it has a runtime environment that handles types, garbage collection, etc. I've started reading that PDF book, and I can't say that I've learned much yet. I'm also not looking for a short cut or anything. It is simply that up until I encountered Squeak (the past 18 years) I have never dealt with a visual environment that deals with development in the way that Squeak seems to. The only thing that I have ever seen that even compares (in my mind) to Squeak is Sun's Lively Kernel, an even newer innovation than Squeak. So my background is in C/C++, Java, Ruby, C#.Net, Visual Basic (6/.Net), Python, Perl, (X)HTML/CSS/Javascript/XML, PHP, and ASP.Net. How do I take what I know of those programming languages, Agile development process and such, and go forward in learning how to use Squeak? I've heard several people state that they'll "never go back to" those languages. But I'm very certain that like each of those languages, Squeak has it's place in the circle of code, and is useful for some tasks, while other languages are useful for other tasks. So where do I start then? Do I keep going in that free PDF book, Squeak By Example? Does anybody see my difficulty the way I do? Nathan On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Edwin Castro <edwin.gabriel.castro(a)lifetime.oregonstate.edu> wrote: On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 12:01 PM, Nathan Lane <nathamberlane(a)gmail.com> wrote: So, as a beginner, I have noted the many things people have told me about Squeak, but one thing is really bugging me, and I can't break free of it. In my experience programming is a linear task, not object-based, so how do I program using Squeak which uses "active objects"? I don't understand. I've seen this happen a lot when I see new programmers. They'll write single method programs that simply make library calls or implement (inline) all the functionality they need. My brother took a "learn to program" course in college (in C yuk!) and all his programming assignments looked like this. I *tried* to teach him to look for patterns and to remove dupplication but he never got the hang of it. Writing functions that could be reused was a difficult thing for him to comprehend. I find that a lot of new programmers learn to program in a procedural style and then continue to apply that style with other languages they use even if they should use a different style. I think that working through an example to show how to think about objects would be very helpful for beginners. I would recommend David West's book, Object Thinking, but a lot of people didn't like the book. I really enjoyed the book but perhaps there are better ways to teach how to think about objects... -- Edwin _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners -- Nathan Lane Home, http://www.nathandelane.com Mirror, http://nathandelane.awardspace.com -- Nathan Lane Home, http://www.nathandelane.com Mirror, http://nathandelane.awardspace.com ____________________________________________________________________________________ You rock. That's why Blockbuster's offering you one month of Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost. http://tc.deals.yahoo.com/tc/blockbuster/text5.com

1 0

Collection subclasses
by Rob Rothwell 07 Apr '08

07 Apr '08

If I create a simple object subclassed from Collection, SequenceableCollection, or ArrayedCollection called CollectionObject, with CollectionObject>>#initialize self halt. and execute: CollectionObject new. the halt is executed. Whereas, if I subclass CollectionObject from: Set Dictionary OrderedCollection Array It does not. Is one not supposed to make subclasses of these classes, and if so, why not? I have an object that is most naturally a Dictionary-like object with various subclasses, but I can not initialize it... Thank you; I feel I am missing something very basic in my understanding! Rob Rothwell

6 8

ActiveRecord?
by Rob Rothwell 07 Apr '08

07 Apr '08

Has anyone written anything like the ActiveRecord for Glorp? VW7.6 has something, but it would be slightly painful to port (for me at least) as it uses VW Package definitions and a few other things I am not familiar with. I know Ramon did something that used Magritte, but I am not using that in my application. There are many ways of varying complexity that one could try to standardize your Glorp mappings within your application, so I just thought I'd check if anyone had anything working before I go down that road! Thank you, Rob

6 8

More than 1K in a block
by Marcus Strehlow 05 Apr '08

05 Apr '08

Hi guys, you've probably been asked this like a hundred times or so... Is it possible to have more than 1K in a block execution? I have a block that apparently exceeds 1K, and I really need it to be executed in the way it is. It's only like 5 lines that it complains about, somewhat important 5 lines. If I comment them out, it works, but information is then missing on the final window. I keep getting this error message when I am trying to save that code, telling me that more than 1K is not possible. Can anyone of you tell me if I'm really bound to 1K per block, or if there's a way around? Thanks, Marcus -- iMac -- 20 inch -- Core 2, 2 GHz -- 1 GB RAM -- Superdrive -- Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2 MacBook -- 13.3 inch -- Core 2, 1.83 GHz -- 1.5 GB RAM -- Combodrive -- Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2 iMac G5 -- 17 inch -- PPC G5 1.8 GHz -- 1 GB RAM -- Superdrive -- Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2 iPod touch -- 16 GB -- Software Upgrade -- iPhone OS 1.1.4

2 1

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

Beginners April 2008