[Fonc] The future of VPRI?

[Dave Crossland]

Hi

I ran into Walter Bender at the FSF Libre Planet event last month, and have
since been been reading up on OLPC. I was a G1G1 customer 8 years ago, but
I lost interest in the project and stopped paying attention soon after. I
have been intensely curious what happened to OLPC in the last 8 years, and
this naturally led me to VPRI.

So I thought I'd say hello on this list and ask you all what the roadmap
looks like for VPRI in the coming years? :)

[Dave Crossland]

After more googling around, I wonder if anyone here has any experience and
insights with www.amber-lang.net or www.lively-web.org or www.pharo.org ?
:)

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Post by Dave Crossland
After more googling around, I wonder if anyone here has any experience
and insights with www.amber-lang.net <http://www.amber-lang.net> or
www.lively-web.org <http://www.lively-web.org> or www.pharo.org
<http://www.pharo.org> ? :)

Hi Dave,

That's a big question. I'd encourage you to play with them all (and
more) and draw your own conclusions. My own thoughts on all that are below.

== More details

I have limited experience with all three of those, but ultimately,
taking a cue from Dan Ingalls and Lively, it seems like JavaScript in
the browser is a tsunami of change for the programming world. So, I've
been focusing on JavaScript for both client and server (currently mostly
with TypeScript and a vdom like Mithril or Maquette for the frontend,
and Node.js on the backend). JavaScript has many warts. JavaScript was a
language designed in two weeks as a scheme clone in drag (the best parts
are Scheme) and then hacked at by vendors with competing financial
interests. Compare that to Smalltalk designed for a decade by a small
team doing continual user testing of each language feature). JavaScript
has been called "better than we deserve". They key advantage of
JavaScript is that it is everywhere and webapps automatically install by
just visiting a URL (if you have JavaScript turned on in your browser,
which 99% of people do). As Alan Kay has pointed out in relation to
Lively, if people won't install your software, then it is of not much
value for them. However, rather than try to draw an entire GUI from
scratch like Lively, I use vdom and then also Canvas and SVG/D3. My most
recent significant FOSS project with that set of tools as a year-long
labor of love:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/narrafirma

Working this way is tremendously inelegant, messy, and frustrating
compared to using a good Smalltalk (it is sad VisualWorks got scooped up
for a song after being wrecked out of greed and then kept proprietary
while Squeak lost momentum form non-FOSS-compatible licensing issues and
such until it was straightened out years later). For example
JavaScripters are currently excited about finally getting proxies but
without knowing about "become", so the proxies are still relatively
useless (compared to what Smalltalk made possible for decades).

However, I can hope someday I might have tools that could reflect back
on themselves to (like Squeak's VM) create a better host for themselves.

And in any case, even if inelegant, it's a bit like when people write
games in C++ at 3X-10X the effort of some other options like Smalltalk
so they run faster for millions of people. In this case, I can write
JavaScript apps at 3X-10X the effort of Smalltalk, but installing them
is trivial compare to convincing them to download and install an app.

Amber Smalltalk provides another approach, but from when I last
seriously looked at it a couple years ago, is a niche thing would
require a bunch more investment to make it really comfortable for me.
And then it still faces everyone learning JavaScript and not Smalltalk
(and the jobs being in JavaScript and not Smalltalk). I have not tried
it recently though. I'd love to see it or something similar succeed big
time.

Wish I had time to, say, integrate WebAssembly with Amber...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAssembly

Pharo has helped bring Squeak a long way, but then you are back to the
install issue (unless you use it as a webserver like with Seaside, but
Seaside is still not a webapp and has all the usual serve issues vs.
webapp issues).

Still, while I like much about Smalltalk, including the keyword syntax,
Smalltalk the language might do well to modernize how comments and
strings and some other basic things are done. At this point, there are
needless barriers to using a Smalltalk-like architecture for someone
used to C or Java or JavaScript syntax where strings become comments,
and comments are syntax errors. Sure, they need to learn about keywords,
but much of the rest is kind of arbitrary. A Typescript-derived language
with an added keyword syntax and improved Smalltalk-like semantics might
be an interesting thing to explore...

And don't get me started on a proliferation of buggy unfinished
JavaScript libraries and frameworks that often reinvent the past badly. :-)

It's a very sad state of affairs. As someone who has been writing
software for over 30 years, it is disappointing. But, I can't control
the wind; I can only control the sail. I do not have much time for big
projects reinventing the web. I do know I can write really cool stuff
that is easy for almost everyone to run by working in
JavaScript/TypeScript and a vdom like Mithril or Maquette and using
Canvas and SVG/D3 -- even if it is much harder than it needs to be.

I pointed out aspects of this years ago on this list, talking about how
a programming system can be seen both as a telescope and a microscope
vs. reinvented purely from the ground up. See this chain going backwards
almost a decade:
https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5444005&cid=47520095
https://www.mail-archive.com/***@vpri.org/msg01445.html
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2007-March/007822.html
"There is once again the common criticism leveled at Smalltalk of being
too self-contained. Compare this proposal with one that suggested making
tools that could be used like telescope or a microscope for relating to
code packages in other languages -- to use them as best possible on
their own terms (or perhaps virtualized internally). Consider how the
proposal suggests scripting all the way down -- yet how are the
scripting tools built in Squeak? Certainly not with the scripting
language. And consider there are always barriers to any system -- where
you hit the OS, or CPU microcode, or proprietary hardware
specifications, or even unknowns in quantum physics, and so on. :-) So
every system has limits. But by pretending this one will not, this
project may miss out on the whole issue of interfacing to systems beyond
those limits in a coherent way."

Related humor: :-)
"Honesty in [Programming] Employment Ads"
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/04/18/0140255
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=13162&cid=333864#commentwrap
"A job ad has appeared offering one lucky worker the chance to perform
"Meaningless Repetitive Work on the .NET Stack". ...
Sometimes you just need to mix it up. It can't all be Silicon Valley in
the Sunshine State. Someone has to keep the cogs turning on
mission-critical infrastructure in large enterprises where all hope has
been lost.
Grease the wheels of capitalism with your tears, secure in the knowledge
that we will pay you handsomely for your soul.
Multiple generations of legacy code that cannot be refactored without
destroying the entire house of cards.
Design anti-patterns as a design pattern.
Live, mission-critical system where you develop on the production instance.
Large sections of managed and native COBOL.
Easily top every development horror story at LAN parties."

When FONC can help with that sort of situation, it will be really
something... :-)

To be clear, I'm not against writing better systems from the ground up
as FONC aspired to. I think that is a lot of fun. And it may eventually
lead to great stuff. I have my own musings about that, like multicore
easy-to-understand Forth-ish hardware using message passing. But until
something succeeds in the marketplace of money and also ideas, that
leaves the rest of us with very little in dealing with the daily
difficulties of programming in the large.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_in_the_large_and_programming_in_the_small

Alan Kay talks about biological metaphors of cells and integrated
organisms (the baby that grows 10X while never being taken down for
maintenance) and FONC as I understand it seems to be about designing a
better meta-programmable baby. But, what we programmers seem to face in
day-to-day reality is more the biological metaphor of complex ecosystems
full of millions of years of weirdly ad-hoc-ly adapted co-evolving
program modules which we sometimes have to understand via a complex and
fragmentary fossil record while bushwacking through the jungle that
grows in again as we pass through it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_archaeology

Anyway, this is probably not that well thought out a rant, and I should
probably sleep on it, :-) but that's my current (and past) perspective.
Maybe I will revise it in years to come. :-)

JavaScript (especially via TypeScript) is definitely growing on me. I'm
starting to move past meta programming to think that someone has to
really write real code that does real stuff sooner or later in all the
meta layers. It has been said (Brian Kernighan) that since debugging is
harder than programming, if you write the most complex [meta] programs
you can, how will you ever debug them? I'm starting to feel maybe we
need better tools for managing straightforward boilerplate code with
less levels of abstraction. Maybe we need tools to be able to help all
the programmers greasing or tweaking the wheels of whatever system we
have around us at the moment. Related:
"Modern times"

Or also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indirection
"A famous aphorism of David Wheeler goes: "All problems in computer
science can be solved by another level of indirection";[1] this is often
deliberately mis-quoted with "abstraction layer" substituted for "level
of indirection". Kevlin Henney's corollary to this is, "...except for
the problem of too many layers of indirection.""

Like balancing a pole on your hand, so much of what we do day to day in
programming (or helping others fix broken programs) is to try to keep
something within a narrow manageable zone where the task is doable. Once
a pole goes too far from vertical, it is going to fall no matter how
much you try to keep it up. Some metrics like cyclomatic complexity can
help us in seeing when the pole is falling, but there remain many
nuances such things don't capture -- excessive levels of abstraction
perhaps being one.

So, do complex meta systems really usually help with the fundamental
problems of computing when you get beyond toy examples of managing
complexity? Or do they help with other related daily programming
problems problems like dealing with ambiguous requirements and constant
change among dependencies ("bit rot") and so on? Maybe sometimes, but it
has to be the right meta system and it has to work so well it does not
get in your way.

See also:
http://gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html
"Scott Rosenberg coins this as Rosenberg's Law: Software is easy to
make, except when you want it to do something new. The corollary is, The
only software that's worth making is software that does something new."

In any case, when I squint, I can kind of see all those
JavaScript-powered browsers and Node.js servers out there running a lost
of FOSS code hosted in git as running a badly-written Smalltalk VM
exchanging badly-formatted messages. And, compared to what we had
before, when I had to plunk down about US$9K to get a license to
VisualWorks plus Envy in the mid 1990s from ParcPlace where I could not
even ship most of the VisualWorks code I worked with like the Smalltalk
compiler for licensing reasons and almost no one else used Envy, that I
guess is progress. :-)

--Paul Fernhout (pdfernhout.net)
"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Try S8 Smalltalk ;-)
Browse an image with tools embedded in a web page
http://u8.smalltalking.net/profile/aleReimondo/239/index.html
[snip]

Hi Alejandro!

Thanks for the email about S8 and U8 in response to my previous FONC
post to address some issues I raised there. Sorry I did not see it
sooner as I had checked the list archives online for followups back then
but your email was sent directly to me and I just noticed it yesterday
in a different folder.

So, I played around with S8 yesterday, and it is pretty amazing.:-)
http://u8.smalltalking.net/

Here are some comments on that experience.

First, come practical issues I experienced:
* Firefox did not have draggable windows.
* There was a point at which after some use the Chrome window locked up
(on a Chromebook).
* The use of file-in format for writing methods is awkward.
* Response to clicking on classes and methods was slow (they turned red
probably to indicate a delay, and then eventually sometimes seconds
later the source showed up -- or even longer when looking at some
classes with a lot of methods).
* Trying to save an image snapshot led to an error ("Uncaught
ReferenceError: fileWrite is not defined") and it was not clear what it
was trying to do in the browser.

So, while S8 does a lot and looks great, there were still some rough
edges as I experienced them. That does not mean those may not be easily
fixable or maybe just due to my own inexperience with the system or
particular hardware etc.. I remember Squeak in its early days. And
ObjectWorks and Digitalk's Smalltalk/V too for that matter. Or Lively. :-)

But a deeper issues as I think on the social coding aspects, there is a
deep issue with social implications which Alan Kay has talked about) is
that there is the Blue and the Pink plane. One group (or one person at a
specific time) wants to take Smalltalk in new directions, and another
group (or even the same person at a different time) wants to use
Smalltalk as it is. That makes social coding harder to think about
within a specific system when changing a lot.
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?BluePlane

For example, these are some changes I'd like (if I had time, which I
don't right now) to make in a Smalltalk (whether in a JavaScript-based
S8 or something else maybe even a C-based or Forth-based or
Assembly-based Squeak):
* Display methods as code that is evaluated to define methods instead of
file-in format.
* Support coding directly in JavaScript and maybe TypeScript for methods
(as essentially primitives, but also callbacks).
* Changing the Smalltalk VM so every (non-immediate) object was one or
more arbitrary records that could mix bytes, integers, floating point
values, and/or other object pointers all safely managed by the virtual
machine (which would also support safe-ish FFI calls and internal pointers).
* Building full support into the VM for numpy-like and scipy-like
mathematical operations on arrays over those records, as well as other
low level byte and float and integer manipulations.
* Reifying the Virtual Machine as a "vm" variable that messages could be
sent to for doing low-level things and using that for all low level
access (so, no use of "primitives" with magic numbers or similar methods).
* Support for generating WebAssembly for the underlying vm code like
Squeak compiles Smalltalk to C.
* Using high speed method dispatch tables (one slot per possible
selector) and maybe an object table.
* Replacing the class hierarchy with compositional construction of
message handlers from named functions which act like classes, where
every chunk of memory allocated (an "object") can have a message handler.
* Changing the Smalltalk syntax in various experimental ways, like using
C-style/JavaScript comments and strings and perhaps even supporting
JavaScript with messages
(e.g. new MyJavaScriptObject() x: 10 y: 20; ).
* Supporting including snippets of code in any language in a Racket-like
way.
* Maybe multi-threading support using the new Mozilla Parallel
primitives.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/05/a-taste-of-javascripts-new-parallel-primitives/
* Eliminating the class side of Smalltalk objects which makes code
browsing harder and replacign that with factor methods or perhaps
instance methods denoted as "static" like in TypeScript.

Anyway, whether these are good ideas or not is not the issue here (even
as I think they might be good ideas to try). But doing most of them with
S8 (or Squeak) would make it hard or impossible to share code in systems
that made assumptions about a standard Smalltalk syntax or library. So,
the U8 social aspect aspect would presumably break down if you can't
just file in packages that run with the existing language? Yet, I could
do all that with projects on, say, GitHub, and people could discuss
them. Is there a way U8 could support all that experimentation as social
coding around Smalltalk?

Or maybe that is some future project for VPRI -- to support that kind of
"Blue plane" experimentation by a community doing Smalltalk-inspired
systems for the web browser or elsewhere?

Anyway, that's just a first response. I appreciate what you have done,
and it is inspiring.

I did not include your full reply which raised some other good points
because you did not post it to the FONC list, but I appreciated hearing
more about your work, and I encourage more people to check out S8 and
U8. Your work is a great contribution to moving the state of the art
forward for Smalltalk even as it may still be a work in progress worthy
of much more support.

--Paul Fernhout (pdfernhout.net)
"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

[Florin Mateoc]

You should also check out SqueakJS.I am also in New York, maybe we can grab a beer sometime. We used to have Smalltalk users' group meetings in New York, I miss them :)

Florin


On Monday, April 18, 2016 3:34 PM, Dave Crossland <***@lab6.com> wrote:


After more googling around, I wonder if anyone here has any experience and insights with www.amber-lang.net or www.lively-web.org or www.pharo.org ? :) 

[Kim Rose]

Dear Dave,

Thanks for your message and interest in VPRI.

Other than some volunteer efforts VPRI has little to do, officially, with olpc these days.

We continue to work on projects and problems concerning programming langauages, UI design and tools for children and adults to amplify learning and human interaction through a variety of media.

As for a "roadmap", we have recently begun some interesting and exciting collaborations with new colleagues from around the globe. We plan to provide more info about this soon -- via vpri.org and other means of communication.

Regards,
Kim

Hi
I ran into Walter Bender at the FSF Libre Planet event last month, and have since been been reading up on OLPC. I was a G1G1 customer 8 years ago, but I lost interest in the project and stopped paying attention soon after. I have been intensely curious what happened to OLPC in the last 8 years, and this naturally led me to VPRI.
So I thought I'd say hello on this list and ask you all what the roadmap looks like for VPRI in the coming years? :)
--
Cheers
Dave
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[Dave Crossland]

Hi Kim!

Thanks for your reply :)

Post by Kim Rose
Other than some volunteer efforts VPRI has little to do, officially, with olpc these days.

Yes, indeed; OLPC seems to have persevered until around 2012, selling over
2M XOs, and then become very small. An OLPC France volunteer has led the
development of http://server.sugarizer.org as a shell for the many
activities that have themselves been ported to the web in the last 10 years
- including http://server.sugarizer.org/activities/Etoys.activity/index.html
:D

Post by Kim Rose
We continue to work on projects and problems concerning programming
languages, UI design and tools for children and adults to amplify learning
and human interaction through a variety of media.

Its great to hear that the work continues :)

I've struggled to understand what current and future work of VPRI might be,
and I'm also somewhat struggling to tie together the website's description
of the activities to the published works of the past.

For example, http://vpri.org/html/work/pichri.htm says,

"The research team at Viewpoints Research is working on ways to create,
illustrate and share powerful ideas content in both dynamic and WSIWYG
ways."


I'm not sure, though, if any of those ways has been published about? I
couldn't find anything about publishing in http://vpri.org/html/writings.php
:/

Post by Kim Rose
As for a "roadmap", we have recently begun some interesting and exciting
collaborations with new colleagues from around the globe. We plan to
provide more info about this soon -- via vpri.org and other means of
communication.

Cool! Who are these colleagues? I'd love to learn more about them :)

What are the other means of communication - as I'd love to subscribe :)

[DeNigris Sean]

Post by Florin Mateoc
I am also in New York, maybe we can grab a beer sometime. We used to have Smalltalk users' group meetings in New York, I miss them :)

Me too! I’ll contact Charles and see if he’s interested in reviving. Either way, I’m in for the beer ha ha!

[Alejandro Reimondo]

+1

I have contacted Charles a few weeks ago because I was there
and interested in make a presentation of S8 (for smalltalkers).
It has been looong time from the first presentation of S8
to the group; and there are a lot to discuss on how to
make our way with smalltalk today.
I will be happy and want to have more excuses
to visit NY again :-); so if you meet, I would like
to fly from home (in Buenos Aires) to share how
we are doing smalltalk today in complete
integration with the world.
Ale.

[*] S8 let us implement dynamic native applications
for iOS (100% in smalltalk), also server side apps
(desktop win/osx, ios and/or android server running
also IN the phone)

Post by DeNigris Sean

Post by Florin Mateoc
I am also in New York, maybe we can grab a beer sometime. We used to have Smalltalk users' group meetings in New York, I miss them :)

Me too! I’ll contact Charles and see if he’s interested in reviving. Either way, I’m in for the beer ha ha!
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[Dave Crossland]

Hi

Thanks for all your replies - lots for me to read up on before I get back
with a real reply :D

I'd love to meet up in NYC - I work from 15th St and 8th Ave, so can meet
anywhere in lower Manhattan really, and Wednesday or Thursday evenings next
week are both good for me :)

Cheers
Dave

[Florin Mateoc]

This Wednesday is good for me too
Florin


On Thursday, April 21, 2016 7:22 PM, Dave Crossland <***@lab6.com> wrote:



Hi
Thanks for all your replies - lots for me to read up on before I get back with a real reply :D
I'd love to meet up in NYC - I work from 15th St and 8th Ave, so can meet anywhere in lower Manhattan really, and Wednesday or Thursday evenings next week are both good for me :) 
CheersDave

[Dave Crossland]

Hi

Post by Dave Crossland
I'd love to meet up in NYC - I work from 15th St and 8th Ave, so can meet
anywhere in lower Manhattan really, and Wednesday or Thursday evenings
next week are both good for me :)

Sorry Florin, I didn't make any better plans for this.

How about Thursday May 5th at 7pm at Starbucks at think coffee on 8th Ave,
just south of the 14th St ACE/L subway stop?

Cheers
Dave

[Faré]

Post by Dave Crossland
Hi

Post by Dave Crossland
I'd love to meet up in NYC - I work from 15th St and 8th Ave, so can meet
anywhere in lower Manhattan really, and Wednesday or Thursday evenings next
week are both good for me :)

Sorry Florin, I didn't make any better plans for this.
How about Thursday May 5th at 7pm at Starbucks at think coffee on 8th Ave,
just south of the 14th St ACE/L subway stop?

I'll be there, too!

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Who released the most slaves? The one who spent his wealth buying them back?
Or the capitalist who found a way to power mills with water? — Paul Claudel

[Florin Mateoc]

Can we make it 7:30pm?


On Wednesday, April 27, 2016 12:28 PM, Dave Crossland <***@lab6.com> wrote:


Hi
On 21 April 2016 at 19:20, Dave Crossland <***@lab6.com> wrote:

I'd love to meet up in NYC - I work from 15th St and 8th Ave, so can meet anywhere in lower Manhattan really, and Wednesday or Thursday evenings next week are both good for me :) 

Sorry Florin, I didn't make any better plans for this. 
How about Thursday May 5th at 7pm at Starbucks at think coffee on 8th Ave, just south of the 14th St ACE/L subway stop?
CheersDave

[Dave Crossland]

Post by Dave Crossland
How about Thursday May 5th at 7pm at Starbucks at think coffee on 8th Ave,
just south of the 14th St ACE/L subway stop?

Sorry I mean at think coffee NOT starbucks - 73 8th Ave, New York, NY 10014
:)

7pm to 9.30pm, everyone welcome :)

[DeNigris Sean]

Post by Dave Crossland
7pm to 9.30pm, everyone welcome :)

Great! I should be able to stop by…

[Thiago Silva]

Post by Dave Crossland
7pm to 9.30pm, everyone welcome :)

Great! I should be able to stop by


I'm also in NY, would love to come by.

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[Dave Crossland]

Hi

Post by Thiago Silva

Post by Dave Crossland
7pm to 9.30pm, everyone welcome :)

Great! I should be able to stop by


I'm also in NY, would love to come by.

I'm really sorry but my wife bought some tickets for an event that evening
so I can't make it :(

Seems like there is plenty of interest though so I suggest you meet without
me :)

Perhaps we can schedule another event in June?

[Faré]

The place is big enough that's it's hard to find each other if we don't
know each others' faces.

I wear a top hat with a 10/6 label.

Sorry for the mailing list noise. We ought to start some NYC meetup mailing
list.

Post by Thiago Silva

Post by Dave Crossland
7pm to 9.30pm, everyone welcome :)

Great! I should be able to stop by


I'm also in NY, would love to come by.

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[Dave Crossland]

Sorry again that I couldn't make it!

How was the spot?

When will the next one be - June 22? :)

[Faré]

Post by Dave Crossland
Sorry again that I couldn't make it!
How was the spot?
When will the next one be - June 22? :)

The spot was fine for the two of us (Florin and me).

For the next one... what about starting a mailing-list fonc-nyc, so we
don't clog this mailing-list with local messages anymore?

I just created this mailing-list, that you can subscribe to:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fonc-nyc

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
I'm only a stupid AI, but my creator is a real genius!