Re: [Pharo-dev] Call about Numerical Methods in Pharo :)

Sun, 06 Mar 2016 05:31:52 -0800

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Amen!
My lastname is St-Jean, like it or not I'm closer to Ducasse than Hollansworth!
I discovered Smalltalk with ObjectWorks on AIX : I'm closer to Pharo than 
Python, C, C++, C#, Ruby, Snobol, Dart, Go or any other language... Like it or 
not, I'm closer to Smalltalk than Java, COBOL or any other retarded programming 
language...

I've been working as a consultant in Smalltalk since the 90s.  I don't care : 
VW, VAST, VSE as long as it's Smalltalk!  I'm closer to Pharo than I am to 
anything else (except Modula-2).
This stupid war is sooooooo stupid!
If you know what the DNU acronym means, you're a Smalltalker. Period.
Pharo can go its own way (whether I like it nor not), but it's still Smalltalk!
These guys (the Pharoers, and Stéphane Ducasse) have made *tremendous* steps 
forward. Like "how come nobody ever did that for Smalltalk except James 
Robertson" ?
I like Pharo.  I fell in love with VW 2.5.  

Vous êtes si belles, vous toutes!
I love Smalltalk!


 ----------------- 
Benoît St-Jean 
Yahoo! Messenger: bstjean 
Twitter: @BenLeChialeux 
Pinterest: benoitstjean 
IRC: lamneth 
Blogue: endormitoire.wordpress.com 
"A standpoint is an intellectual horizon of radius zero".  (A. Einstein)

      From: Dimitris Chloupis <[email protected]>
 To: Pharo Development List <[email protected]> 
 Sent: Sunday, March 6, 2016 7:00 AM
 Subject: Re: [Pharo-dev] Call about Numerical Methods in Pharo :)
   
Sorry guys but I dont think this is non sense because you may be coding in 
Pharo and Smalltalk for a long time, but as a beginner I was confused by this, 
and to this day I am still confused why Pharo is not calling itself a modern 
implementation of Smalltalk. Even in Pharo by Example there was no mention at 
all the Pharo is a Squeak fork, nothing, now there is (few week before) , guess 
who added it. No mention about Squeak in our website whatsoever.  Why ? Do we 
just fork and forget about them ? 

Also this whole guilt about the so called "failure" or "death" of smalltalk is 
hilarious. Smalltalk was never popular and we certainly wont be with Pharo, 
because in the end its very unfamiliar and most coders dont like going outside 
their comfort zone. Personally  I am fine with that but this is why I use Pharo 
to get outside my comfort zone and think outside the box, but I dont kid 
myself, I belong to a tiny minority. 

I am sorry if you feel that we derail the thread, but some of us feel very 
uncomfortable by some people trying to mislead newcomers that Pharo will at 
some point brake away from Smalltalk heritage when we all know that wont happen 
for the following reasons 1) Smalltalk is an awesome language and its failure 
to become popular has nothing to do with the IDE and the language and more to 
do with lack of libraries, documentation and third party tool support plus of 
course the all important familiarity b) Most likely a ton of Squeak and older 
Smalltalk code will remain in Pharo because none sane enough would removed code 
that has stood the test of time, is well designed and works c) Even if you have 
a tiny sense or realism you will realize that the reason why people use Pharo 
is because is a modern implementation of smalltalk, trying to connect with 
modern technologies but at same time remaining a smalltalk in the core.

And finally lets take into account that all languages are evolving. 

I was coding C++ till 1996 and was very frustrated with the language, manual 
memory management, inflexible type system, horrible GUI libraries (MFC). Now I 
learn C++ 11 which means an almost fully dynamic type systems (see auto , 
templates etc) , automatic memory management (smart pointers), vast array of 
greatly design GUI and graphics libraries (QT, Unreal, GTK etc). In 20 years 
C++ has become night and day, sure still much more ugly than Pharo but far, far 
better . Did we stop calling it C++ ? 

I totally agree, that this discussion arises few time per year and in the end 
we dont agree. But I dont post here to make you change your mind, I know people 
rarely do that, I post here because I want to make crystal to begineers viewing 
this mailing that for me and many others: 

Pharo IS Smalltalk, Pharo IS a Squeak fork, Pharo is a modern implementation 
that tries to push forward but respects its heritage and pays credit to it.   


 Saying that if this numpy variant library intends to target only Pharo then it 
makes more sense to call it SciPharo. 

On Sun, Mar 6, 2016 at 12:30 PM Volkert <[email protected]> wrote:

  +100
 
 On 06.03.2016 09:48, stepharo wrote:
  
 Why Pharo is not smalltalk and will not be Smalltalk
 
     - First because we make it to free us from the past. 
 
     - In the future we want that people that learned smalltalk in the 90 do 
not discard Pharo because
 
                 - "what killed smalltalk was that we could not work well in 
team"
                 - "smalltalk oh it does not scale"
                 - "I cannot edit my code with emacs"
                 - "oh back in 1993 I got lecture and the system took 10 min to 
boot on our sparc (I got this story yesterday)"
                 - I did not get how you work in team
                 - "with Smalltalk you cannot save your code in svn"
                 - "Smalltalk is monolithic"
                 - "you are in a cage you cannot interact with the outside 
world" a guy organising OOPSLA
                 - "Smalltalk what a dated name! bavardage: tu programmes en 
bavardage, donc les resultats ne doivent pas 
                 etre si super que cela...."
 
 I do not care that these statements are right or wrong. 
 I do not care that people are ignorant. And yes with some education we can 
show that they are wrong. 
 There are in the mind of people that got in touch with Smalltalk. 
 No more no less. 
 
 So may be Smalltalkers should read book about marketing in general. 
 
 So you are stuck in your history and I'm dreaming about the future: and the 
future is Pharo not Smalltalk. Face it. 
 There will be no renewal of Smalltalk. Pharo is the chance for Smalltalk to 
exist in 2050.
 The future is much more important that the history. 
 
 You do not make people dreaming telling them that back in the 1940 you add to 
cross the street to fetch water. 
 
 
 
 
 
 left blank on purpose
 
 
 
 Le 5/3/16 18:22, Eliot Miranda a écrit :
  
 Stef, 
 On Mar 5, 2016, at 12:10 AM, stepharo <[email protected]> wrote:
 
  
  You probably leave in a protected environment but I do not live in the same. 
 Did you check numPy recently or R? momemtum?
 Do you think that people do not know how to count? 
 In 1980 my students were not even born, so how can it be better than 
     python, java, c#, lua, ...
 
 Do you think that it makes me happy to see my old friends leaving our language 
and do node.js.
 Seriously. 
 Why do you blame me? Frankly tell to leave Pharo and I will leave. I can tell 
you.
 I think that I need a break in my life in this moment so it would be a good 
opportunity. 
 Because if each time I do something to improve the wealth and visibility of 
our system
 I get such kind of feedback then may be this is the time to do something. 
 Afterall I may be wrong. 
 Seriously if you think that I'm not doing a good job and you want to stay with 
old friends
 just let me know. but if I stay then do not tell me that I'm an asshole that 
does not want to 
 promote smalltalk. 
  
 
  I do not blame you.  I am offended by Pharo disavowing the Smalltalk name.  I 
am offended when people state Pharo is not Smalltalk.  I want to refute false 
assumptions about the name Smalltalk, such as the equating it with cobol.  
Instead of taking it personally why don't you address my points about older 
programming languages whose names (AFAICT) are not perceived negatively? 
  
  I support this community and am excited to participate in it.  I admire and 
respect your efforts, Stéphane, in developing, organizing and supporting this 
community.  But that does not mean I will keep quiet about something I 
profoundly disagree with and think is wrong.  And that thing is to deny Pharo 
is Smalltalk. 
  And I do this not because I am a zealot, but because words meaning are 
important, because to understand each other we should call a spade a spade, and 
because I am grateful for and delighted by this thing called Smalltalk, and I 
will not support taking credit away from it.  Ruby is inspired by Smalltalk.  
Pharo is the real thing. 
   
 Stef
 
 Le 5/3/16 02:18, Eliot Miranda a écrit :
  
 
 
 On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 12:08 PM, stepharo <[email protected]> wrote:
 
  
 
 SciPharo? Not so great news from my POV.
 What is so much pharo specific in this library?
 Is Smalltalk scientific community large enough for yet another split?
  
 Split of what? Let us be tagged with a name of 1980 and die in peace. Yes this 
looks like a 
 smart move. 
 There are just Python and R and Javascript around (not talking about ruby and 
swift)
 so this is a great move. We are not the cobol of object-oriented programming!!
  
 
  When I read sentiments like this it makes me want to leave the community.  I 
find it so offensive that the Pharo community uses Smalltalk but wants to 
distance itself.  It feels like theft or massive disrespect for the inventors 
of the language, or a complete lack of gratitude. 
  C is older than Smalltalk and no one says "C is the cobol of low-level 
imperative languages".  List is much older than C but no one wants to rename 
Lisp because it is perceived as old. 
  Smalltalk is a beautiful name, carefully chosen to differentiate and identify 
the system as different, not arrogant, not  hieroglyphic.  Further, Smalltalkl 
/is/ different and distinctive materially.  Why anyone would be ashamed of that 
incredible heritage and pervasive influence is beyond me. 
  Offended, Eliot

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