FullBlockClosures

From Blocks to BlockClosures now to FullBlockClosures. It is nice that Clément Béra summarizes current activities for Sista on his blog.

Walls, Pillars and Beams: A 3D Decomposition of Quality Anomalies

A video demonstration of a 3D approach (in Pharo) from the paper with the same title.

Functional callbacks on all Cog platforms

Pharo as well as Squeak are based on a common virtual machine implementation (Squeak VM, later Cog). This virtual machine source code recently was moved over to GitHub as OpenSmalltalk VM to better maintain the (small but existing) differences in the virtual machines for Squeak, Pharo, Newspeak and Cuis Smalltalk.

Within all open source Smalltalks derived from Squeak (Squeak, Pharo, Newspeak) historically and initially there was a mechanisms to call external code outside the Smalltalk environment. This mechanism was called FFI - which is the abbreviation for foreign function interface. So you could call external libraries to perform an action.

Later there was another mechanism called Alien FFI that also allowed to pass a callback function to the ouside world. Alien was provided in 2007 by Eliot Miranda and old docu could be found here and here.

In Pharo later there was another mechanism called "NativeBoost" (provided by Igor Stasenko) to call external functions. NB allowed to be using native code directly and really fast as the native code was attached to a compiled method and lived within the image. Relying on assembler (provided by a package called ASMJit) the NativeBoost solution is very fast - but also hard to maintain because NB was not as portable as the initial FFI solutions.

Later Pharo decided to resynch all these efforts into what is now known as UFFI (Unified Foreign Function Interface) provided by Esteban Lorenzano. UFFI unifies and also borrows from FFI, Alien and even NativeBoost.

Also with the more aligned OpenSmalltalk VM the different open source Smalltalks come closer together. Current work in progress on the virtual machine side is to allow for 64 bit Smalltalk systems and to better support ARM architecture beside x86 one.

Eliot now announced that Alien now has functional callbacks on all x86 platforms, ARM32 platforms and x86_64 platforms. This is another major step in having a portable interface to the outside world as we can use callbacks on all these platforms. Great stuff!!!

CuboidMatrix: Exploring Dynamic Structural Connections in Software Components using Space-Time Cube

A demonstration video of the VISSOFT paper by Teseo Schneider, Yuriy Tymchuk, Ronie Salgado and Alexandre Bergel. Done in Pharo.

SmallWorlds for Pharo

Interactive Fiction framework in Smalltalk is released. Read more

Talking Small

Another newbee is discovering Smalltalk. Looks like he tries to learn a language each month and also stumbled over Pharo.

If he really wants to learn Smalltalk and find out more he for sure will need more time than just a simple month. Initial steps in Smalltalk are easy, also syntax is easy to learn - but learning what power it contains requires more time and a deeper understanding. Also it takes a while to understand why things are the way they are. Often learning to deal with pure OO also means to unlearn (bad) things from the mainstream programming languages...

Nonetheless nice summary of his early steps.

LRP - Live Robot Programming in Pharo

How does a PR2 move through a door opening? By using LRP of course! Live Robot Programming (LRP) is a live programming language designed for the creation of the behavior layer of robots. It is implemented in Pharo.

Pharo Launcher

was updated to Pharo 5. Cool!!!

Iceberg - better Git for Pharo

Iceberg, the future git integration for Pharo 6.0. Read more

Pharo and 3D

The nice work of Ronie Salgado with Pharo and 3 summarized on his page. Nice!

Voyage with Unqlite support

For relational databases there is the tiny SQLite database solution that just requires a simple linked library (DLL/SO file) including the full database engine.

There is a similar tiny database called Unqlite in the NoSQL world. Pharo already had a Unqlite binding in the past. Before Pharo 5 this "PUnqlite" project was based on Native Boost. It was provided by Masashi Umezawa and I extended the project with a spec based UI to provide a database browser for Unqlite.

During the Pharo 5 development I discussed with Esteban many issues on #Slack about porting several of my projects to UFFI. We also discusssed about Unqlite and Esteban quickly ported the PUnqlite binding over from NB to UFFI. This was done on GitHub. Additionally I remigrated the changes back to the original repo of PUnqlite on STHub and made it loadable from Catalog in Pharo 5 again. So with Pharo 5 you again have a package "PUnqlite" that you can load from Catalog. Just open Spotter and type in the name.

During these #Slack sessions we also discussed about Estebans Voyage framework. Voyage is a layer that allows for very simple persistence in Pharo. It is explained here and here.

So far Voyage only worked with MongoDB as backend. Often Mongo requires some setup which might be overkill for simple deployable applications that you want to build with Pharo. So we also discussed about using UnQlite as a backend for Voyage.

Esteban wanted to work on this for a project and now first results are available: Voyage is now restructured with a second backend to support also UnQlite beside MongoDB.

Cool - thanks Esteban!

VM support switching from SVN to Git

The Cog subversion repository is moved over to GitHub

More than 15 arguments

support is on its way. But I guess if you have need more than 15 arguments in a method you should think about your design. Possibly an argument object would be applicable.

HaltOnce

haltOnce was improved in Pharo 6

Slack Client

Interesting, there is an implementation of a Slack client on SmalltalkHub.

File Dialog

A simple replacement for Pharo's native file/folder selection dialog. Code is here.

Updates for Ubuntu Pharo VM

Read more here.

PassBy[ME] from Pharo

Use 2 factor authentication service PassBy from Pharo with PBMAuthenticator

Pharo NoSQL on GitHub

MongoTalk and Voyage frameworks are now on GitHub

Enterprise Pharo Book

Enterprise Pharo book is out

Update on Sista

Interesting update on Sista.

MPDClient in Pharo

Client side interface to the Linux Music Player Daemon written in Pharo. Project is here.

Smalltalkers seriously not kidding

Like this ycombinator thread: "When they say that in Smalltalk, everything's an object, they're seriously not kidding. Everything is an object, including compiled code, stack frames, execution contexts, threads, etc. "

ObjectStatistics

A simple objects analysis tool. Read more.

inline if in Smalltalk

No! No! No! Dont extend Smalltalk with things like that.

Just because you can extend Smalltalk does not mean you should do on all ends. So unlearn your traditional syntax thinking before starting with it. Code should tell a story to be maintenable and not end up in deciphering cryptic syntax sugar.

Lets think in objects and stay readable with: #ifTrue;ifFalse: please!

64Bit support progresses

64Bit virtual machine for Pharo, Squeak, ... are in the pipe - VM developers move forward on this frontier. There is now also 64bits image generation for Pharo.

While in the last century it was hard to run dynamic systems like Smalltalk times have changed a lot.
But now Hardware and software become faster and even smaller each day. This leads to suprising results.

Ubuntu Ambiance Theme for Pharo

A theme for Pharo to look like Ubuntu. Looks nice. Code is here.

Readability

A Pharo project on ... readability.

Introduction of Pharo 5.0

Masashi Umezawa provides some slides on Pharo 5.0

LibNotify binding

for Pharo is available here.