ESUG 2016 Registration

Read more.

Aqueducts

Nice quote on Twitter:

"Every time I look at Smalltalk, I feel I know how Dark Age engineers must have felt looking at the Roman Aqueducts."

FullBlockClosureInstaller

In Pharo installing Kernel classes is far from trivial (the SlotClassBuilder raise error and one cannot modify the Kernel classes using the IDE).

This package from Clement allows to install the correct classes for the FullBlockClosure, and update everything so all the state is correct. Nice.

Smalltalk VM History

Did you notice that the commits from Eliot Miranda to the Squeak/Pharo/Cuis/Newspeak VMMaker packages follow a year pattern (1850, 1851, ...) and include not only a description of the changes but also what happened in the year corresponding to the commit number.

Wonder what happens when he reaches 2016 and following commits...

Genetic Algorithm for Pharo

A genetic algorithm implementation is available from the Pharo Catalog provided by Alexandre Bergel.

I helped Alexandre in providing the config for this. I like the package. His genetic algorithm code is nice and interesting - it allows to play with Genetic algorithms in the regular Smalltalk tools (workspace, inspectors, ...) and the package also provides Roassal visualizations for them. 

You definitely should check this package out. Code is on STHub.

Arff Generator in Pharo

Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks. Weka defines a format called "Arff" to be used for data importation. On GitHub you will now find an Arff generator written in Pharo.

Changing Pharo background picture

Want to style your Pharo image with a wallpaper image? Peter describes the possible options in detail.

JSON persistency with SQLite database in Pharo

as described by Pierce on his blog. Really nice!

Scratch performance

Tim optimized Scratch for the Raspberry Pi ... now it runs much faster. Read more.

Minimal tODE API

The GemStone/S GCI code was ported to UFFI and now allows to have a minimal tODE API for accessing the object database from Pharo 5.0. Read more.

Mocketry 3.0

New version of Mocketry 3.0 for Pharo is available. Read more.

PolyMath-Extensions

Newton's method for vector problems (experimental) is in ‪#‎PolyMath‬ Extensions. Read more

Pillar 3.0.0 release

is available. Read more.

Alternate Reality Kit by Randall Smith at Xerox PARC 1986

Algernon-Launcher for Squeak

Back from the days when I used Squeak there was a nice tool called "Algernon" which was a simple "type in search" tool. I used it very often.

Later in Pharo days such a tool was missing - but after a while the "Spotter" tool for Pharo was provided by the GT team based on the same idea.

The nice thing is that now also the Algernon code was updated for latest Squeak in a project called "Algernon-Launcher".

BTW: Spotter does not allow to evaluate the given text as expressions, but the tool is extendable and maybe should provide this Algernon feature by default as well.

IWST 2016 - International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies

CALL FOR PAPERS is here.

VM Learning: Call Stack Management

Want to learn about virtual machine construction. Then check out this one.

Generate Spec CRUD applications

Code is on STHub and a video is here:

Open WebBrowser from Pharo

A simple package for unform and platform independent WebBrowser access for Pharo:

• for Pharo 4.0 onwards based on NativeBoost
• for Pharo 5.0 onwards based on UFFI

Read more here.

PARROT AR Drone 2.0 with Pharo

Repo with code is here. Read more here.

Joystick test in Pharo

Joystick test (part of OSWindow project in Pharo)

Video on how to report a Pharo bug and contribute by fixing it

Short video on how to report a bug in Pharo and fix it.

Pharo Pomodoro (updated) - version 1.6

Updated the code of Pomodoro timer for Pharo 5 once again:

• settings with custom start value and custom colors
• better resizing behavior of the morph
• pause/continue - start/restart possibility
• default colors aligned with Pharo scheme
• pause state in Pomodoro instead of Morph
• separate core and tests in own packages

demonstrated in a new video:

New version of Mocketry 3.0

is available. Read more here.

MessageFlowBrowser updated for Pharo 5

I updated my MessageFlowBrowser for Pharo 5 and added a new video:

TDOOOP Slides from ETAPS 2016

Interesting Slides from Oscar Nierstrasz from an invited talk at European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2016) with the provocative title "The Death of Object-Oriented Programming" (TDOOOP)

 As meanwhile any technology claims to be object orientied (or object based) I would rather say

"OOP is dead long live REAL OOP (with Smalltalk and Pharo)"

Pharo Days 2016 Session 2 GT Moldable Tools

Pharo Days 2016 Session 1

Linear Algebra Package for Smalltalk built upon LAPACK

called Smallapack. Check out out here.

Pharo and CentOS

I created another video on my CentOS support for Pharo