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On reading a text file in Smalltalk   25 Sep 04
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(Source: comp.lang.smalltalk, Lex Spoon) If you accept losing one notch of performance, then you can make much clearer code in Smalltalk. The "file lines" idiom in this thread is very useful, because you can then use collect:, select:, etc., on the resulting collection of lines.

And it is important to consider that once you commit to, say, iterating over an entire file, that the file must be reasonably small anyway to get decent performance. The same issue exists with collections. Who cares if collect: creates an extra collection or if WriteStream wastes space at the end of a long underlying collection; if these concerns are really so important then probably this huge collection should not exist and/or you should not be iterating over the entire thing anyway.

To put it very simply: you just can not expect a program to work on large data structures just because you micro optimized everywhere. If you want to handle large data structures then it takes planning and specialized algorithms and test cases. If you are not going to put in that effort, then don’t sweat the small stuff. It is very liberating to code with an eye towards correctness and towards algorithmic performance, and not to worry about getting down the constant factor. It seems to lead to lower stress, faster code production, and fewer bugs generated.

Alan Kay's talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003   25 Sep 04
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(Source: Cory Doctorow) Notes from "Daddy, Are We There Yet?"

The last 20 years of the PC have been boring. PC vendors aim at businesses, who aren’t creative in their tool-use. They’re adults: they learn a system and stick to it. We should think about children. The printing revoltuion didn’t happen in Gutenberg’s day, it happened 150 years later, long after Gutenberg was dead, when all the pople alive had grown up with the press.

A small minority of Gutenberg’s contemporaries got the printing press, but it wasn’t until they were dead that the children who grew up with the press were able to put the ideas into practice.

James Licklieder: in a couple of years, human brains and computers will be coupled. It hasn’t happened yet. Except in science, where scientists and computers are indeed thinking as no human brain has ever thought before. .. craphound.com/kayetcon2003

DE: Squeak Artikel C't   25 Sep 04
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In der C’t 7/2004 erschien ein Artikel ueber Squeak. Programmieren lernen mit Squeak: Von kleinen und grossen Erfindern. pdf

Smalltalk isKindOfLike: Yogurt   25 Sep 04
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(Source: Stefan, comp.lang.smalltalk) Smalltalk is like an Apache hellicopter. Java is like a B52 bomber with pretty heavy duty jet engines.

Smalltalk is very well thought out, extremely well engineered, very flexible, and generally gives quite good performance in a multitude of situations. It’s very adaptable to many different situations, and has lots of tricks up it’s sleeve. Driving it is a bit of a paradigm shift from driving your average plane, it has some new fancy controls, but once you get the hang of it, it can be totally amazing and really fun. Even if you don’t totally know what you’re doing you can still get yourself out of a jam. Given that you’ve got a good pilot you can launch off to a quick start and really do some very heavy and impressive damage in a very short time. It also tends to perform quite impressively if you’ve got a few of them around, and easier to coordinate an army of them.

Java is pretty difficult to drive, and once you get it going in a certain direction it’s pretty hard to get it going somewhere else. It has a few turbo buttons on it so that if you really know when and where to use it, it can fly pretty well. You can surely get it going really fast if you fly it high enough and then point it straight into the ground. It’s generally not very flexible and often a real pain to deal with, but overall once you’ve got a flightplan fixed in stone you can fly it reasonably well and run it reasonably efficiently. If you are meticulous in your planning and implementation, it can really deliver the goods. If you make some mistakes, things can go very wrong that may become almost impossible to correct. Don’t count on any big changes, quick maneuvers, or any sort of fancy tricks that just might save the day, and leave yourself a good bit of time for planning and implementation before you expect to be able to deliver the goods. If you come accross any surprise attacks or come up against an Apache hellicopter, you could be doomed.

Using the right hammer ..   25 Sep 04
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(Source: Robert Martin (UncleBob) in the pragprog-list) As a contractor you must do the best job you can for your client. This includes picking the best language for the situation. I agree that there are situations in which Ruby might be the best technical solution, but the worst political solution. In that case, you cannot use Ruby — you must use a technically inferior, but politically preferable language. There are other situations — more and more of them — in which Ruby is politically acceptable, and technically superior.

Squeak is a toy - so ?   25 Sep 04
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(source: email from Martin Drautzburg to stx-users ML; Oct, 22, 2003)
 > PPS:
 > I remember working for a company, where it took the make utility3/4 of
 > an hour to figure out *what* to compile, and the compilers a day to
 > compile- it was a C++ project b.t.w. which was canceled and replaced by
 > a Smalltalk program after they spent 50man-years on a non-working
 > program - so much for non-toy languages !

Yeah and I just spent 3 days in an inhouse J2EE workshop held by one of our chief architects. We spent most of our time fighting with the tools. Changed setting over and over. The goal of the workshop was to demonstrate how to insert a row into an oracle table. At the end of the 2 days the table was still empty. Another non-toy language.

I have written two small apps (apx 5000 LOC) one in squak and one in stx. It was a dream. Got up in the morning and fixed two or three bugs before breakfast. You can only do this with a real cool environment.

Smalltalk must be dead because ...   25 Sep 04
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Donald Raab posted this goodie to the st-mailinglist.

It’s probably because in order to post in the Java ng he has to be 10x as verbose as in the Smalltalk ng.

He probably has to declare himself, cast himself, wrap himself in a try catch block, bubble up any exceptions, use some external iterators, implement some interfaces, and wrap up his primitives in real objects. Maybe after auto-boxing and generics are supported, he’ll only have to post 7 or 8x as often.

Don’t worry James, we appreciate and understand your terseness over here. ;-)

HREF Considered Harmful   25 Sep 04
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(Source: Avi Bryant) I came across Avi Bryant's blog. Tons of interesting stuff, especially about Seaside. http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/avi/blogView

ERP5: A Next-Generation, Open-Source ERP Architecture   25 Sep 04
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(Source: IEEE Computer Society) When someone says enterprise resource planning (ERP), most IT professionals think of the expensive, complex, and difficult-to-implement commercial products that were the rage a few years ago. Although many large corporations did reap tremendous cost savings from the implementation of such systems, an average implementation cost counted in the millions of dollars; this has prevented ERP systems from spreading to small and medium-sized businesses. After ERP deployment, its "blackbox" nature prevents from understanding and eventually improving the business processes it implements, leaving some important business decisions to the software publisher rather than to the corporate manager, preventing scientific researchers from getting involved in management innovation.

This situation provides much of the motivation for our architecture, ERP5, which offers several advantages for business. All ERP5 tools are open source, so are free and have openly available source code that a business can change to suit its processes. ERP5 incorporates, from scratch, advanced concepts such as object-oriented databases, a content management system, synchronization, variations, workflows, and a method to model and implement business processes. ERP5 is also a Web site where researchers can share innovation on management techniques and their implementation through software.

In 2001, two companies initiated the ERP5 project: Nexedi, a Zope service provider in France (Zope is a well-known open-source application server), and Coramy, a European apparel manufacturer. They aimed to develop a set of ERP software components for small and medium-sized companies. In addition to source code, the project also produced educational material and a clearly defined theoretical model. To fit the needs of smaller companies, they also designed ERP5 for distribution across distant sites with slow and unreliable Internet connections.

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SAP costs too much - customers   25 Sep 04
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(Source: Register) Every now and then, an analyst firm gathers up its collective courage and issues an ROI study which contradicts everything a vendor’s marketing department would have you believe.

So hats off to Nucleus Research for firing a salvo at SAP for causing customers to shell out millions on software with little more than added worker productivity in return. link

 

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