Self-interest April 2024

self-interest@lists.selflanguage.org

7 participants
6 discussions

UKSTUG meeting - Tudor Gîrba: What exactly is Glamorous Toolkit? - 24 April 2024
by UK Smalltalk 22 Apr '24

22 Apr '24

To some people Glamorous Toolkit is a Pharo environment. To others it’s a knowledge management system. Others might see a code analysis platform, a data visualization or an API browsing tool. Yet others see the graphical stack with its interactive editors. Glamorous Toolkit is all of these. But it’s really also none of these. These are merely examples of the many forms the environment can be molded to. And there can be many more. Glamorous Toolkit is primarily an environment that makes it possible to create many experiences seamlessly and contextually. This then leads to a new way of programming that we call Moldable Development. Tudor Gîrba is a software environmentalist and the CEO of feenk.com ( http://feenk.com/ ) where he works with an amazing team to make the inside of systems explainable. Much of the work is embodied in Glamorous Toolkit ( gtoolkit.com), a novel environment that enables moldable development. This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/ukstug/events/300575234/ ) to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!

1 0

Self Update and Question
by Russell Allen 20 Apr '24

20 Apr '24

Hi all! I thought I'd give a general update... On the `dev` branch. we have a version of Self which will build and run (if the appropriate 32-bit libs are present) on the latest releases of Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. (With many thanks to https://github.com/nbuwe) Sadly we can’t build or run on MacOS anymore. We should run on WIndows under WSL2, but I haven't tried it. Linux works for most distros, however some like Ubuntu are increasingly painful for running 32-bit apps. Also I haven’t tried Self on a distro which uses Wayland instead of X11. There is a framework for building VMs at https://github.com/russellallen/Self-VM-Builder. It uses Qemu to provide emulations of various OS/architecture combinations. On the Self side, there is a bunch of small additions and changes to the main sources. We are very overdue to do a release. What I’m not sure of is what that looks like. I can see three options: (1) The easiest path is to just provide the source and let interested people build their own VMs. This is the approach take by, for example, SerenityOS. (2) If we want to provide binaries, we could try to get the VM into the main package repositories but there are a *lot* of them now, especially now we also have snap, flatpak etc! (3) Alternatively we could do what Rust and Pharo do, and provide a script to install, eg `curl https://install.selflanguage.org | sh` (But I know some people hate this) Does anyone have thoughts? Russell

1 0

Classless?
by xd3a9gsmwk＠liamekaens.com 07 Apr '24

07 Apr '24

Let's say we want to program a controller for four lift shafts to serve ten floors. We are going to have to model the idea of a call button, and model about 80 individual objects that conform to that idea, right? These would be involved in mediating the calculation that feeds the outputs toward the motor controllers, so as to drive the lift cars in the appropriate direction and speed to serve the calls, open the doors, etc. That's what a straightforward design would do in building such a controller, regardless of what programming language you were using, right? What would the code look like, where we model the call-button concept and the individual call buttons?

6 10

Examples?
by xd3a9gsmwk＠liamekaens.com 05 Apr '24

05 Apr '24

Is there a software library, written in Self and packaged as a module, that I can read?

2 1

A Case Where Cloning Seems Necessary
by xd3a9gsmwk＠liamekaens.com 04 Apr '24

04 Apr '24

I have been exercising a library that supports the creation of (speaking loosely) processes. When a process is launched from outside of any process of the scheme, the new process is told a procedure to execute. A process may `fork`, which creates and launches another process having some of the same attributes as the calling process (in particular, the same scheduler). Processes can terminate with success or failure. An operation `alts` is available that is handed a series of procedures to try until one of them succeeds. For implementing `fork`, `alts`, and similar operations, it seemed natural to want to clone the process. To support these uses, I packaged a scheme that allows to specify how cloning is to work for a clone family. The specification is handed to a library function and it returns the first prototype of the family. Client code will ask this prototype to clone itself to get objects to use (and mutate). The specification for a clone family can include: - methodsToBind: every clone will bear these as partially evaluated with itself as the receiver. The bound procedures are convenient to pass as callback functions, e. g. through the scheduler. - heritableProperties: these form the traits object to which all the clones delegate. - noCopyKeys: slots having these keys are not copied.

1 0

Newb question: pattern to generate objects with common behavior
by xd3a9gsmwk＠liamekaens.com 04 Apr '24

04 Apr '24

I tried reading much of the Handbook to answer this very basic question, and didn't find it. How do Self programmers usually set up to be able to create at runtime a family of objects with shared behavior, more or less analogously to using a class and its `new` selector or operator in some other languages? I understand, I think, the basic semantics provided by the Self object system. But what are the usual programmer practices as to paths to get to the relevant parts for the equivalent of a class? I suppose you might have a prototype object and a traits object, and your equivalent of `new` would be to ask the prototype object to clone itself, which gives you a shallow copy, right?

2 2

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

Self-interest April 2024