I used Cuis at first to display hand written G-Codes in graphic form for a printed circuit board. I kept up with Cuis through a few versions and found a couple of bugs for Juan. Eventually Casey advised going to Squeak so I did. Perhaps my requests were getting annoying.
I'm mostly interested in using a multi-core Squeak with GC control for my robot. Tim says a multi-core VM is coming for the new Pi. He hasn't answered on GC control. With muliti-core a user need not see GC control but the system should provide 100% GC free service even if behind the scenes it momentarily toggles one GC off and lets the other complete.
With real time driving, which I hope my robot will do some day, getting rid of all 100ms delays is vital.
On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 4:54 PM, Dan Norton dnorton@mindspring.com wrote:
On 5 Jul 2015 at 16:22, Kirk Fraser wrote:
We should ask why do people want to teach Python instead of Smalltalk? Why do people veer away from Smalltalk with add-ons like Etoys, Scratch, and many other paradigms like Patterns and CRC cards, which aren't as good for commercial programming, thus really aren't as good to teach children? What can be done to remodel Squeak to provide all the features more commercially popular languages have?
Earlier a post saying a boss didn't want a GUI that a combination of buttons would bring up all sorts of things his employees shouldn't be playing with. So put a cleaner commercial GUI on the list. Maybe the preferences switch could be in its own file or as the first character in Sources to reduce file count. The Changes file shouldn't be needed in a deployed application. Is there any way to cut the deployment image down to one file containing both the Sources and VM like an .exe in any other language?
I've written on the need to fix Garbage Collection control so it can be turned off like Python allows to enable Squeak to be used for real time projects like self driving cars, since a 100ms delay can veer 8 feet off course, fully into a lane of oncoming traffic.
Recently I learned from a UC Berkeley website it takes 100ms to recognize the objects in a picture too. Does that mean the future will have a cloud in every car and Squeak needing to conduct image analysis in hundreds of cooperating cores to get safe real time performance?
The state of Squeak for all its benefits seems like a collection of law statutes, a big set of text contributed by years of legislation that nobody can remember all of and some of which makes little sense. Maybe a major rewrite starting from zero would help?
" like a collection of law statutes" is a good analogy. Cuis seems like a major rewrite of Squeak and is simpler, easier to understand. What do you think of Cuis?
The GUI - while it has many nice features, it somehow seems to lack the crisp precision, ease, and speed of commercial software like Solidworks. I like how Squeak comes up and is ready to go far quicker than say Amazon's Audible application but Squeak graphics aren't so fast or easy to program as Solidworks.
Recently I saw a couple of short videos on two moderate size robots where users extolled their ease of programming. Perhaps Smalltalk needs a new top level rule based language to improve programmer efficiency. I'm working on this one. And as my prototype was so easy, it angers me to think of all the time I spent being both ignorant and afraid after seeing various compiler books like the "Dragon Book" intentionally make compiler writing a difficult graduate level course instead of an easy advanced beginner level assignment.
But one thing I have in common with my Raspberry Pi, when my utilization is maxed for too long, I overheat and shut down. I can write simple stuff like this when it's too hot to do real work. But even multiple cores get too hot when they are maxed out. So a real time computer needs heat control or cooling overkill in case a vital complex situation clogs the bandwidth. Well, pray about it.
- Dan
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