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#smalltalk

9 posts8 participants0 posts today
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amen zwa, esq.

Small- to medium-sized businesses should shun the massive web #UI frameworks and application services being peddled by BigIT, when developing their small, internal-use business applications intended for use by a handful of in-house business analysts. Instead, these companies should use #Smalltalk (Pharo, Cuis, or Squeak) to develop such software. Smalltalk has tonnes of advantages—not to mention decades of track record—for implementing enterprise applications:

• It is purely OO with decent FP facilities (it is the precursor of modern OO-FP hybrids)
• Its simple syntax can be described on a 5×7 card
• It is easy to get comfortable with, so much so that generations of preteens have used it in classrooms, so an experienced modern programmer can pick up the language in mere minutes
• It is powerful enough to implement itself, its libraries, its UI, and the whole blessed OS on the Alto
• It is the progenitor of the MVC pattern and, since IBM VisualAge, all modern implementations use the time-tested MVP pattern
• Its persistent VM obviates the need to export application state to external persistent media like file system or relation database (the VM is the application state, as it were)

Pharo Smalltalk, sponsored by INREA, is my favourite. Its creator, Stephan Ducasse, is friendly and accommodating, and is a prolific writer. See this Pharo Books list: books.pharo.org.

Those who are leading SmallIT should read these Pharo books:

• Pharo by Example (language)
• Enterprise Pharo (usage)
• Testing in Pharo (TDD)
• Application with Spec 2.0 (GUI)

Pharo does support conventional IT practices:

• Zinc HTTP
• Seaside web UI framework
• Voyage object database
• Glorp ORP

books.pharo.orgPharo books
Public *
amen zwa, esq.

#Smalltalk #Units

My Phellow Pharo #Programmers who write scientific #software, do have a look at the Units package, which can safely perform mixed-unit computations like the following to obtain the correct result \(63.21 ft\):

\(\texttt{14foot + 15m.}\)

The NASA-Lockheed Mars Climate Orbiter catastrophe could have been avoided, had the probe control software been implemented in Smalltalk.🤣

github.com/zweidenker/Units

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Cli.

A simple package for units. Contribute to zweidenker/Units development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHubGitHub - zweidenker/Units: A simple package for unitsA simple package for units. Contribute to zweidenker/Units development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Paolo Amoroso

The Xerox PARC alumni who contribute to the Medley Interlisp project shared the buttons they collected at computing conferences in the 1980s and 1990s such as AAAI, IJCAI, SIGGRAPH.

The buttons are awesome and span a range of languages and systems such as Interlisp, Lisp Machines, Smalltalk, Unix, Modula-2, Mesa, Pilot, and more. Be sure to go through the whole thread.

groups.google.com/g/lispcore/c

groups.google.comConference buttons
#retrocomputing#interlisp#lisp
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Thomas Arend

„Wir haben über Sie gesprochen“, leitete eine von vier älteren Frauen das Gespräch mit mir ein, als ich mich mit meinem Tablett an einen freien Tisch beim Bäcker setzte. „Ich weiß, die Leute reden immer über mich und ich weiß auch worüber“, antwortete ich. „Das ist ja auch recht offensichtlich“, gab sie zurück.

Das war ein für mich völlig neuer Einstieg in das Thema #Barfußlaufen. Normalerweise beginnt es mit: „Ist das nicht kalt?“

#barfuß#barfuss#barefoot
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PulkoMandy

Hey, it's #AmstradCPC #Smalltalk time again!
First of all, ùCPM fanzine released their 6th issue including my article introducing the project (lovely designed and printed on CPC, and great choice of illustrations, unfortunately for some of you, it's in French)

After a few days of thinking, I decided to throw away my semi-generational gc, and instead use the Baker two-space gc. It is simpler, and hopefully it's faster. The memory "waste" should be fine, I have lots of memory anyways?

Public *
amen zwa, esq.

The original #LISP had 7 primitives: \(\texttt{cons}\), \(\texttt{car,}\) \(\texttt{cdr}\), \(\texttt{atom}\), \(\texttt{quote}\), \(\texttt{eq}\), and \(\texttt{cond}\). And the original #Smalltalk syntax could fit on a 5×7 card. That meant a novice could learn the syntax in a matter of minutes, and direct all his efforts to learning how properly to wield the power of that Turing-complete language. This was why, in the 1970s and the 1980s, many college freshmen were taught FP in Scheme (a more modern LISP) and many middle school children were taught OO in Smalltalk. These were surely the best "first" #programming languages.

#FORTRAN and #BASIC were simple, too. FORTRAN, the first high-level language, has been in continuous use since the late 1950s by engineers, who are not keyboard warriors. BASIC was invented in the early 1960s for teaching programming to non-STEM students at Dartmouth. It sired a whole generation of self-taught children in the 1980s.

Compare those to C++, Erlang, Python, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Scala, Rust, Kotlin, and pretty much every language in popular use today. Most consider Python and JavaScript to be the simplest of modern languages. Yet, they are massive, complex languages. No 10-year-old could teach himself those, nor should he.

The original versions of those classic languages cannot be used to solve modern problems. But they should still be taught to youngsters as their first language. Throwing in the kids' faces a modern enterprise language confuses them and discourages them. Consequently, many novices never attain that state of flow, when the joy of programming gushes forth.

#Simplicity is a virtue. Self-motivated learning is virtuous.

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Marcin Kamyk Kamiński

💬 Small talk to jedna z tych rzeczy, które dla wielu osób są zupełnie naturalne, ale dla innych stanowią istną torturę. Może i dla Ciebie? Czasem po prostu nie masz ochoty na rozmowy o pogodzie, o prawicowych trollach, czy jałowego pytania zaczynającego się od "co tam u Ciebie?" i marzysz, by w spokoju dotrzeć do celu, nie wikłając się w zbędne gadki. Jednak jak to zrobić, żeby nie być uznanym za mruka czy chama?
#poradnik #smalltalk #rozmowa #komunikacja #introwertyzm
marcinkaminski.pl/small-talk/

Marcin Kamyk Kamiński · Jak uniknąć small talku i nie wyjść na gbura? Poradnik - Marcin Kamyk KamińskiSmall talk Cię męczy? Sprawdź skuteczne sposoby na unikanie small talku, które pomogą Ci uniknąć niezręcznych pogaduszek.
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