[Cuis] A formal presentation to the list

Frank Shearar frank.shearar at gmail.com
Thu Dec 12 04:55:11 CST 2013 

On 11 December 2013 13:37, Ignacio Matías Sniechowski
<0800nacho at gmail.com> wrote:
> Frank,
> Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you too :)

> Thanks for your clarifications. As I am new to Squeak/Pharo/Cuis, I don't
> know how they evolved. But I guess that -perhaps- one lesson to learn is
> what Juan says; sometimes as the system grows in complexity is hard to avoid
> over cluttered images and thus a lot of stuff there becomes legacy code as
> it's very difficult to track changes and maintain it. That's why I,
> personally, think that having a sound, simple, fast, and elegant kernel
> where "less is more" is the rule, is a very good point to start building on.

Agreed. Mainly, Pharo and Squeak got into the mess we have today because
* there wasn't sufficient review of new additions
* it's very hard to _finish_ things, so people often half-fixed an
issue, or half-completed a rewrite, leaving two implementations of a
thing in the image
* Smalltalk's all-objects-in-one-big-pot meant that noone had to face
modularity issues.

This last point means two things: it was (and is) very easy to create
a dependency between two packages without realising it, and also it's
very easy to create cyclic dependencies between things, so that you
can no longer bootstrap the system.

> Personal mastery is better achieved if one understands all the basic kernel
> and then ventures on grasping other packages that may suit some other needs.
> For instance, I think I can manage to know well and deep something like 500
> classes. On the other hand, I'm almost pretty sure that I will miss a lot if
> a system has 3000. But that's how it works for me, I know that other people
> are able to grasp a whopping number like in Cincom ST.
> I wish I could have the time to master a system like that, unfortunately
> it's not my case.
> My first encounter was with Pharo, then I took a look at Squeak and I felt
> lost there, Nebraska, eToys, Universe an overloaded Morphic. Imagine that
> for me, even Pharo is a complex system... but its complexity is handled in a
> way that with sometime I know what stuff matters for me and what not, and it
> seems it is advancing fast to gain a great deal of extra modularity - even
> the Browser will be unloadable. Also it has some amazing packages like
> Roassal, Moose..., a very good looking UI and full featured developer tools.
> I'm confident that Pharo developers will manage to not only maintain but
> increase its modularity.

The Pharo guys have done an enormous amount of work, and they have
probably the most resources available of all the open source
Smalltalks. They even have paid full-time devs, which is very nice.

As far as complexity goes, I suspect that Pharo are not any simpler
than Squeak. While they have cleaned up many nasty aspects of Squeak's
tangled history, they have also added many new facilities. New
facilities = more complex, of necessity. In Squeak, simply because we
have very few people, we haven't been able to add new stuff. Given my
current obsession with making things modular, and given I'm one of the
most prolific committers at the moment, that means that Squeak will go
on a strict diet over the near future, as we drive more things out of
the base image into separate, loadable/unloadable packages.

> I also hope that Squeak continues advancing! I will
> take a look at 4.5 -it's already released?.

4.5 is gearing up for a release in the next few months. But we always
have "bleeding edge" versions available. For instance, if you have
Ruby and a few odds and ends on your machine, you could clone
https://github.com/squeak-smalltalk/squeak-ci and run "rake
update_base_image". This would give you a base, up-to-date 4.5 image
of the "cut down" variety. If you ran "rake release" you'd get a 4.5
with all the normal things added to the "cut down" image - Nebraska,
XML-Parser, Universes, and so on.

> Of course I'm with you that in the future the ideal would be that all
> packages could be loaded in Cuis Pharo Squeak with minor modifications.
> Thanks again and best regards

Always happy to see new people discover Smalltalk, regardless of which kind!

frank

> Nachonacio Sniechowski, MBA
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 8:24 AM, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On 11 December 2013 11:16, Ignacio Matías Sniechowski
>> <0800nacho at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Thank you, all of you for your warm welcome.
>> > I totally agree with you. Simplicity is nothing but one side of the
>> > coin,
>> > being the other code quality. It's impossible to achieve a certain
>> > degree of
>> > simplicity and elegance without good code quality.
>> > Once thing I'm curious is about the evolution of Cuis, how was
>> > developed. In
>> > squeak.org says that it's a fork of Squeak. But closely inspecting Cuis,
>> > it
>> > dawn on me that may be it was build from scratch. It seems that
>> > unloading,
>> > correcting, fixing and shrinking Cuis is much more time consuming than
>> > -using Squeak as a guide- build from zero.
>> > I've taken a look at Squeak 1.3 or 1.2 and it was much simpler than
>> > let's
>> > say 3.8 or 4.4 which is impossible to follow.
>>
>> Just for the record, I hope that 4.5 will be the start of a long trend
>> of "getting better". We already started cleaning up messes in 4.4, and
>> 4.5 has made a good start in addressing the inter-package complexities
>> (that Pharo is now starting to get to grips with too).
>>
>> frank
>>
>> > Pharo has lots of classes too,
>> > but everything is very good organized and once you know what is the
>> > purpose
>> > of package X, it's easy to concentrate on those that matter for the
>> > project
>> > being developed. Though IMHO I really prefer "extreme modularity" just
>> > the
>> > kernel.
>>
>> This kind of "extreme modularity" is a goal both of the Pharo and the
>> Squeak communities. It's my hope that not too long from now, the
>> differences between Squeak, Pharo and Cuis will be much less, and that
>> we'll see applications and libraries freely moving between the various
>> communities.
>>
>> frank
>>
>> > If you need something more, then just loaded, only those things
>> > needed for a project.
>> > Is there some guide or tutorial on morphic on Cuis?
>> > Thanks in advance
>> > Nacho
>> >
>> >
>> > Lic. Ignacio Sniechowski, MBA
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 8:00 AM, Casey Ransberger
>> > <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Good to meet you! I'm in Seattle, Washington in the USA. Not terribly
>> >> far
>> >> from Ken as it happens.
>> >>
>> >> I did the main work around visual themes in Cuis, the original taskbar
>> >> (which has since been replaced with something much nicer) and an odd
>> >> little
>> >> thing for moving assets in and out of the image called ContentPack. I
>> >> also
>> >> did some work to update our icons.
>> >>
>> >> In the future I look forward to contributing to the Morphic 3 effort,
>> >> and
>> >> to help continue Juan's earlier work with mobile devices.
>> >>
>> >> I was the second committer to Cuis (after Juan) and I must say that
>> >> it's
>> >> been a real joy to watch the community grow.
>> >>
>> >> It's a wonderful system. I think probably the strongest evidence that
>> >> Juan's approach has been successful is that we were able to actually
>> >> add
>> >> features at the same time as removing classes and methods. Having a
>> >> smaller,
>> >> more manageable core opens up possibilities like this.
>> >>
>> >> Another part of this which is important to me is the idea that "the
>> >> code
>> >> is the curriculum," that the best way to make a complex system easy to
>> >> understand and learn is to include only the highest quality code we can
>> >> imagine, and avoid unnecessary complexity (or "complication") wherever
>> >> possible.
>> >>
>> >> Glad to have you on the list, Ignacio!
>> >>
>> >> --Casey
>> >>
>> >> > On Dec 7, 2013, at 5:53 AM, nacho <0800nacho at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> >
>> >> > My name is Ignacio (aka "nacho"). I'm a smalltalker apprentice, I
>> >> > live
>> >> > in
>> >> > Buenos Aires, Argentina.
>> >> > I came to Cuis from Squeak's homepage.
>> >> > Instantly get identified with Juan's observations, thoughts and
>> >> > reflections.
>> >> > It was like reading what I expect from a simple, powerful and
>> >> > personal
>> >> > development system.
>> >> > Cuis is amazing. Maybe it does not have Seaside, Roassal, Athens,
>> >> > etc.
>> >> > But
>> >> > that simplicity of only one person knowing all the aspects of the
>> >> > system
>> >> > is
>> >> > invaluable.
>> >> > I work in a company and most of the software I need it's developed by
>> >> > me, so
>> >> > knowing the system deep it's something very important for me. And
>> >> > build
>> >> > from
>> >> > there.
>> >> > Thanks Juan for developing such a wonderful Smalltalk environment.
>> >> > Best regards
>> >> > Nacho
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> > -----
>> >> > Nacho
>> >> > Smalltalker apprentice.
>> >> > Buenos Aires, Argentina.
>> >> > --
>> >> > View this message in context:
>> >> >
>> >> > http://forum.world.st/A-formal-presentation-to-the-list-tp4728293.html
>> >> > Sent from the Cuis Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>> >> >
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