[squeak-dev] I went to Biloxi and all I got was a Tshirt

Chris Cunnington smalltalktelevision at gmail.com
Mon Mar 19 15:03:57 UTC 2012


http://twitter.com/#!/metacello/statuses/173496047207849985
http://ss3.gemstone.com/ss/FileTree.html
https://github.com/finworks/smallsource

Here in Biloxi at STIC, formerly Smalltalk Solutions. It's nice to go 
from Toronto at 11 degrees to Biloxi at 25 degrees. This is not Edinburgh.
The casino has a weird policy on wifi so there is none in my room. There 
is an Ethernet jack and a cable bolted to the desk. It is no longer 
bolted. The details of why it is no longer bolted or how that nylon 
twist tie liberated itself I can neither confirm nor deny.

Met most of the people I'll see for the next few days last night. So the 
introductions are done, I'd say. I'm going to a presentation in an hour 
on Dart by Eric Clayberg, who works on Dart at Google. Should be 
interesting in an academic way, as nobody will ever use Dart for 
anything. Tomorrow is a talk by Sam Adams at IBM called Big POOP. They 
are having fun with that name - Parallel OOP.

I thought Smalltalk Directions, the parallel track, the academic track 
was going to be a cavalcade of stars. It has exactly one panel. I 
thought it was going to be a cavalcade, as there are about fifteen 
famous names on the paper vetting committee, none of which are here. If 
I understand correctly the Smalltalk Academic Advisory Council will have 
its one panel tomorrow with Andrew Black, Ralph Johnson, David West, and 
Roger Whitney. That is not to be missed. I guess the panel is about the 
future, so it could be about anything. Several people on that panel are 
destination speakers, I'd say.

Chris Muller and myself had an interesting conversation with Dale 
Henrichs last night. Dale's doing a talk called Practical Git For 
Smalltalk. He want's to disintermediate squeaksource and squeaksource3 
and use GitHub for Smalltalk. Instead of saving to an mcz file, you'd 
save to a directory structure with a chunk file for each method. The 
snapshot in an mcz file would no longer be a binary, a serialized object 
graph, but .st files in directories. If I understood correctly, the 
metadata glue would be JSON.

Seems he had a light bulb moment reading about Otto Behrens at 
Finworks.biz, who has a process of doing just that. Otto's git page is 
above along with the SS3 location and the Metacello repository 
conversation. I tried loading ConfigurationOfFileTree in Pharo 1.3 and 
it failed. Then I tried to load ConfigurationOfFileTree in Pharo 1.4 and 
got the same message: 'The symbolic version #stable is not defined in 
ConfigurationOfFileTree for the current platform'. OK. I guess I'll ask 
Dale about it.

The other idea Dale was mentioning about Metacello was to remove its 
dependency on Gofer or Installer, so that it could be directly 
scriptable.He says instead of a whole inhalation of classes when 
Metacello is used, there would be only two living permanently in the image.

Seems I learned why MetacelloBrowser was a non-starter. For the sake of 
speed he used the class browser and then OmniBrowser to get Metacello 
running. But what Metacello needs he says is a wizard, where the user 
makes a few choices over a few pages. I can't say I'm familiar with any 
such thing in Smalltalk.

OK, looks like if you resist the temptation to use Metacello and use 
Monticello to load MonticelloFileTree and MonticelloFileTree-Core from 
SS3, then they load in Pharo 1.4. And there are class comments. I can 
read those. And talk to Dale. Look at that. They load into Squeak4.3 
without exploding. That's good.

Well, you know what I know for the moment. I'm off to see a presentation 
on a brilliant language that will only ever work on Chrome. More coffee!

Chris




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