The Hitchhiker's Guide to ...: January 2016

Currently in Pharo the image is maintained step by step by adjusting and changing it. It is like a database of objects that you maintain over time.

But since the beginning of Pharo there was this also the dream to be able to bootstrap the image cleanly right from the ground up. It is a lot of work to prepare such a bootstrapping process - but now the efforts bring the first fruits: there is a minimal Pharo kernel that is bootstrapped.

I can only say: amazing work!

Spotting senders and references

Spotting senders and references using Spotter in Pharo is explained here. You can also use the MessageFlowBrowser.

Smooth scrolling with Smalltalk 78

"At one point (Steve) Jobs, watching some text scroll up the screen line by line in its normal fashion, remarked, 'It would be nice if it moved smoothly, pixel by pixel, like paper.' With (Dan) Ingalls at the keyboard, that was like asking a New Orleans jazz band to play 'Limehouse Blues.' He clicked the mouse on a window displaying several lines of Smalltalk code, made a minor edit, and returned to the text. Presto! The scrolling was now continuous." -- Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik

Thursday, January 14, 2016

OSSubprocess first milestone

So far there was an OSProcess project for executing OS commands from Pharo. Mariano is working on a new project called "OSSubprocess" that works with the new unified FFI.

He reached a first milestone now - you can read about the details here.

The Pharo Consortium is the sponsor of this development.

Snowglobe for SqueakJS

Snowglobe is a SqueakJS remote display surface written by Craig Latta for Squeak Smalltalk. So Squeak is running in a browser (Chrome here), acting as the display for a native Squeak app running somewhere else on the internet.

A first demo can be seen in this video:

PharoLauncher with Spur and Non-Spur

Up to image build #50496 (where 50000 range means Pharo 5.0) the Pharo images were non-spur. In December the image was migrated to Spur to get more speed and profit from the new virtual machine architecture. So for any newer Pharo 5.0 image you need the new Pharo Spur VM.

PharoLauncher is now able to find out if an image reguires the new Spur VM or the old one. You can set the location of old non-spur VM and new spur VM in the PharoLauncher settings.

This way you can work with old images Pharo 3, Pharo 4, Pharo 5 up to build 50496 as well as with the newer ones.

Read this post for more details or grab PharoLauncher from CI server.

WorkLog

There is a project from Esteban called WorkLog. It is written in Seaside.

If you would like to see it in action just visit: http://log.smallworks.eu/web/post/ and receive some infos how busy he is preparing Pharo for the future.

Pharo Spur 32 VM on Debian Stable

Want to run Spur virtual machine for Pharo on Debian. Then check out this one.

There is a CI build available.

Turing Machine simulator in Pharo

A Turing Machine simulator written in Pharo by Julien Delplanque.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Tracing the Dynabook

A PhD Dissertation from 2006 about Dynabook and Smalltalk. Interesting nonetheless.

Shortcut learnability in Pharo

A small tool was introduced in recent Pharo 5 images. It is called Shortcut Reminder and reminds you n times about shortcuts that one can use as an alternative to clicking around.

One can enable the tool via Settings. Anytime you use a menu item that has a keyboard shortcut the shortcut is displayed on the screen in large letters. This happens n-times. Depending on your learning curve you can set the number of repetitions in the settings.

Pharo Mooc in preparation

The Pharo community is currently preparing a Pharo Mooc. It's not yet finished and therefore not yet officially announced - but some informations are already available and a lot is going on behind the scenes for it.

There is a GitHub Repo and a Roadmap for it if you already want to dig into the stuff.

The abbreviation Mooc means Massive Open Online Course. It will include tutorials and videos to learn about Smalltalk and Pharo in particular (70 lectures and videos).

The Mooc videos are currently in preparation. It is filmed with a professional setup as:

- Picture 1
- Picture 2
- Picture 3
- Picture 4

prove.

Science Smalltalk v0.39

The last stable version is Science Smalltalk: v0.39 (Pharo 4.0 and Pharo 5.0 with SpurVM) is out.

Monday, January 11, 2016

SqueakJS and Keyboard input on touch devices

There is work in progress to enable keyboard input on touch devices for SqueakJS. Nice!

Thursday, January 07, 2016

Codemash presentation on Smalltalk

Larry Staton Jr gave a presentation on Smalltalk at CodeMash this week. Slides are here.

PharoJS in Toronto

Toronto Smalltalk User group meeting on Monday, Jan. 11 will be on PharoJS, with both NodeJS and browser examples. An interesting topic. Anyone able to record this and publish it as a video?