24 ms·

How does find by example work in the Pharo Finder

108 points by rscho 4y ago

urthor 4y ago
One of the things to appreciate with Pharo Smalltalk is a code snippet isn't a code snippet. Pharo is not a filesystem/.txt coding environment. It's a VM runtime with every single element is indexed by the class/traits hierarchy. And then the same code draws the GUI. OP didn't just write a code snippet. They wrote a method, tested it in an already launched dynamic runtime. And deployed it into a desktop app in front of you. Forget Jenkins, Docker-Compose or Make, their deploy tool was copy/paste. It's truly a pity that desktop based applications are not popular in the current age, and phones are locked down. Smalltalk remains truly unparalleled at producing local apps. 30 years after its heyday, SwiftUI is still a shadow of what Smalltalk can do.
- melvinroest 4y ago
  My favorite example: as the game is easily extendable. https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/PharoChipDesigner https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/PharoChipDesigner
  - rscho 4y ago
    Very nice! Thanks for sharing!
- arnsholt 4y ago
  From 2016 to 2018 I worked on a complex case management application that was implemented in Smalltalk. It ran on Visual Smalltalk Enterprise (last updated in 1999! But the app was first put into production in 1996...) which is really quite crufty compared to Pharo, but the development experience still blew me away. The Smalltalk way of working takes some getting used to, but once I got into the swing of it, it was the the smoothest development process I've had: you log into the app and do your stuff. Poke some bugs, try to reproduce them, maybe find some completely unrelated error, and whenever you update the code you just save the methods and pick right back up from where you left off.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  It's gonna be part of a benchmark for how long until "engineers" realize they're stupid.
  - indigochill 4y ago
    Engineers are still just humans which means they're susceptible to marketing same as any other human. Much of the evolution of popular programming languages is just marketing, most obviously in the case of Javascript.
    - agumonkey 4y ago
      Partly true, partly not true. It's somehow sad to see educated people falling for these tricks. But actually my issue is not about people being diverted by market dynamics.. i can empathize with that. It's the non recognition, non interest when presented with these artefacts. No curiosity, no reading grid to analyze systems or ideas.. shallow reflex criticism .. super odd to me.
      - urthor 4y ago
        Keep in mind that there are some very good reasons the Smalltalk ecosystem wasn't adopted. #1 it's a burden of knowledge to shift from the Unix filesystem to the Smalltalk runtime. There... are no files. #2, quite honestly Pharo Smalltalk has only gotten good in the last 3-4 years. And even then, it has 1-2 really noticeable bugs and what I'd argue are extremely subpar default keybindings, due to it being such a small community. For 30+ years, the only really decent run-times were paid ones you bought for $1k per developer in 1980s dollars. No FOSS. IMO the programming language ecosystem we have today was heavily cemented in the 2005-2010 period. These days the JVM/Python/Javascript/C ecosystems are huge juggernauts. They're not about the programming languages themselves. They're about the massive integration with their underlying compilers, and massive library of tools available. #3, it's a dynamic language for obvious reasons. It's hugely beneficial for applications development, but it's still a slow dynamic language for backend work. And #4. The elephant in the room: End users are divided between Windows, MacOS/BSD, and locked down phone platforms, nobody makes native applications. Everything is a webapp, because an HTML page is truly cross platform. I don't think engineers are wrong to congregate towards webapps. SwiftUI is still extremely amazing after all, but it only produces native MacOS apps. Which is rubbish. But it's important to know your tools, deeply, and understand the context behind the application development industry.
- electroly 4y ago
  "Image-based" is typically how this is described, e.g. https://wiki.c2.com/?ImageBasedLanguage https://wiki.c2.com/?ImageBasedLanguage
draven 4y ago
First time I saw the find by example feature I thought "maybe it tries all applicable methods" but then immediately dismissed the idea because it could execute methods with side-effects. Does Pharo somehow knows about safe/unsafe methods ?
- rscho 4y ago
  I don't think it really does. If I remember correctly, there's a bit of white/blacklisting going on under there.
  - samatman 4y ago
    Smalltalk code is full of these kinds of unprincipled solutions which work better than they should. You can get away with a lot of saying "just trust me" when everything is exposed for immediate exploration of whether invariants are in fact preserved.
- trashburger 4y ago
  I also noticed that the reimplementation uses `receiver deepCopy` for each message send to preserve the original object, so that side effects would not affect the receiver.
- tonyg 4y ago
  The original method finder in squeak has a blacklist of methods not to try, but otherwise works just as you imagine. There's some very cool recent work on isolating effects at a low level that should obviate such grody hacks! Then the system really can freely and safely try all applicable methods. See thread up and down from here https://twitter.com/leastfixedpoint/status/1512391756318392324 https://twitter.com/leastfixedpoint/status/15123917563183923...
melvinroest 4y ago
Pharo recruitment plug: yesplan.be (Belgium) is hiring European Pharo software engineers. If you have little Pharo knowledge that’s fine too, in my (personal) experience, as I am now working with it for 3 months. More on topic: there are many ways in which Pharo can find things that is not possible (or applicable) in other languages. For example, there are 4 mouse clicks you can make in your image: - left click - right click: it shows a context menu And then there are two clicks that I would need my laptop for to (re)figure out. One shows a “halo” around a window. The “halo” gives all kinds of options. The other one shows a context menu that allows you to figure out what objects are running with regards to the pixel you clicked on! Because of the last click, it’s easy-ish to extend your IDE. The last two clicks are some combination of CMD + Option + CTRL + click
- VyperCard 4y ago
  What is your pay for someone who could write this ten years ago in Amber Smalltalk but had since worked with Python and typescript? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uUOlzr4XdcY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uUOlzr4XdcY Asking for a friend…
  - melvinroest 4y ago
    Feel free to email me to have a more in-depth conversation. My email is in my profile.
- e12e 4y ago
  Interesting, from: https://yesplan.be/en/vacancy/full-stack-software-engineer https://yesplan.be/en/vacancy/full-stack-software-engineer > Our backend uses Pharo Smalltalk, Seaside and GemStone/S How is your experience with GemStone/S?
  - melvinroest 4y ago
    For people that don’t know, GemStone is a smalltalk descendant that has an object-oriented database behind it. I don’t know much about GemStone specifics yet, I am about to though. My skillset before this was mostly in React and Node.
tluyben2 4y ago
We have been working for years now on a smalltalk like IDE and a language (which is as language not like smalltalk at all, but as runtime it is). When we went down the rabbithole of prior work (like smalltalk, lisp, etc), it is painful to notice how far we actually have come but how little we actually use / have available to us in mainstream dev. We hope to show how it should be later this year!
- arnsholt 4y ago
  It's kind of depressing, honestly. Smalltalk is amazing future technology from the 1980s, and here we are in 2022 with our fancy IDEs still dropping off our (metaphorical) punch cards for batch processing.
  - tluyben2 4y ago
    Yep... Fairly bizar that a smalltalk env on an old computer is faster for iteration than the modern react/typescript stack. Better errors, easier to debug etc. All because the tooling was from the future. React peeps think hot reload is something special. It was normal and it was faster and more robust than it is now.
    - nyanpasu64 4y ago
      I think there's an inherent conflict between languages creating programs like clay to be molded by the developer and the user, interactively (repl, smalltalk), vs. languages creating programs with optimal machine code with no extraneous computations, and/or maximal low-level control (sometimes even at the cost of making it harder to alter code, like manual data structures or hand-rolled assembly or vectorization). I wouldn't call Smalltalk technology from the future, but rather optimizing for a different ideal (though I've never used Smalltalk to experience the magic firsthand (and/or smoke and mirrors, ctrl+f "white/blacklisting")). Smalltalk (like Java) is bound to a GC, and GC wreaks havoc with using finalizers for manual memory management cleanup, since finalizers can be called while a variable is still in scope unless you use GC.KeepAlive() or friends. On the other hand, optimized C++ is notoriously hard to debug, and debug C++ is slow (especially when using "zero overhead" abstractions that are only zero-overhead in release builds). There's cool work at reversible debugging, binary-patching, etc. (low-overhead tracepoints, Linux kernel Kprobes which failed to hook some functions I think were actually called, CONFIG_DYNAMIC_FTRACE, most recently https://justine.lol/ftrace/ https://justine.lol/ftrace/, though both CONFIG_DYNAMIC_FTRACE and ftrace depend on injecting nops into code which can later be replaced by tracing code). JavaScript excels at neither performance nor dynamism, though I think it's still a lot more dynamic than C++ (userscripts can tamper with page contents and scripting) and faster than Python (through herculean effort of the V8 developers funded by Google ad revenue to make web apps and advertising faster). And C++/assembly, by its nature of allowing complete control over the machine, is difficult to sandbox beyond running code in an isolated process or VM (or compiling to WASM then to x86?), as opposed to JS/WASM being (theoretically) memory-safe and sandboxable by taking away APIs interfacing to the outside world.
bowsamic 4y ago
Does anyone know how to go to a specific implementation of a message for an object? For example can I take "#(1 2 3) min." and go directly to the definition of min? It seems I can only look at _all_ implementations, not just the implementation for that object
- throwawayForMe2 4y ago
  Use the debugger to step through, and you will see the implementation that is about to be executed? The debugger code itself could give clues on how to do it.
geocar 4y ago
Because it starts out in English and does not say so right away, I think it is a good idea to point out that the article is a google-translate, and seeing it in English I get a different idea in places than when reading the Portuguese. For example, I had never before considered how this feature could help people navigate a foreign language so literally.
prestonh 4y ago
La
rubyist5eva 4y ago
7 minutes of Pharo Smalltalk for Rubyists -> https://youtu.be/HOuZyOKa91o https://youtu.be/HOuZyOKa91o
jecel 4y ago
The original description of the method finder was by Ted Kaehler in the July 2001 issue of SqueakNews. That electronic magazine was implemented in Squeak, but can now run in your browser thanks to the SqueakJS virtual machine: https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/SqueakNews/index.html https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/SqueakNews/index.html

108 points by rscho 4y ago

One of the things to appreciate with Pharo Smalltalk is a code snippet isn't a code snippet. Pharo is not a filesystem/.txt coding environment. It's a VM runtime with every single element is indexed by the class/traits hierarchy. And then the same code draws the GUI. OP didn't just write a code snippet. They wrote a method, tested it in an already launched dynamic runtime. And deployed it into a desktop app in front of you. Forget Jenkins, Docker-Compose or Make, their deploy tool was copy/paste. It's truly a pity that desktop based applications are not popular in the current age, and phones are locked down. Smalltalk remains truly unparalleled at producing local apps. 30 years after its heyday, SwiftUI is still a shadow of what Smalltalk can do.

melvinroest 4y ago
My favorite example: as the game is easily extendable. https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/PharoChipDesigner https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/PharoChipDesigner
- rscho 4y ago
  Very nice! Thanks for sharing!
arnsholt 4y ago
From 2016 to 2018 I worked on a complex case management application that was implemented in Smalltalk. It ran on Visual Smalltalk Enterprise (last updated in 1999! But the app was first put into production in 1996...) which is really quite crufty compared to Pharo, but the development experience still blew me away. The Smalltalk way of working takes some getting used to, but once I got into the swing of it, it was the the smoothest development process I've had: you log into the app and do your stuff. Poke some bugs, try to reproduce them, maybe find some completely unrelated error, and whenever you update the code you just save the methods and pick right back up from where you left off.
agumonkey 4y ago
It's gonna be part of a benchmark for how long until "engineers" realize they're stupid.
- indigochill 4y ago
  Engineers are still just humans which means they're susceptible to marketing same as any other human. Much of the evolution of popular programming languages is just marketing, most obviously in the case of Javascript.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    Partly true, partly not true. It's somehow sad to see educated people falling for these tricks. But actually my issue is not about people being diverted by market dynamics.. i can empathize with that. It's the non recognition, non interest when presented with these artefacts. No curiosity, no reading grid to analyze systems or ideas.. shallow reflex criticism .. super odd to me.
    - urthor 4y ago
      Keep in mind that there are some very good reasons the Smalltalk ecosystem wasn't adopted. #1 it's a burden of knowledge to shift from the Unix filesystem to the Smalltalk runtime. There... are no files. #2, quite honestly Pharo Smalltalk has only gotten good in the last 3-4 years. And even then, it has 1-2 really noticeable bugs and what I'd argue are extremely subpar default keybindings, due to it being such a small community. For 30+ years, the only really decent run-times were paid ones you bought for $1k per developer in 1980s dollars. No FOSS. IMO the programming language ecosystem we have today was heavily cemented in the 2005-2010 period. These days the JVM/Python/Javascript/C ecosystems are huge juggernauts. They're not about the programming languages themselves. They're about the massive integration with their underlying compilers, and massive library of tools available. #3, it's a dynamic language for obvious reasons. It's hugely beneficial for applications development, but it's still a slow dynamic language for backend work. And #4. The elephant in the room: End users are divided between Windows, MacOS/BSD, and locked down phone platforms, nobody makes native applications. Everything is a webapp, because an HTML page is truly cross platform. I don't think engineers are wrong to congregate towards webapps. SwiftUI is still extremely amazing after all, but it only produces native MacOS apps. Which is rubbish. But it's important to know your tools, deeply, and understand the context behind the application development industry.
electroly 4y ago
"Image-based" is typically how this is described, e.g. https://wiki.c2.com/?ImageBasedLanguage https://wiki.c2.com/?ImageBasedLanguage

draven 4y ago

First time I saw the find by example feature I thought "maybe it tries all applicable methods" but then immediately dismissed the idea because it could execute methods with side-effects. Does Pharo somehow knows about safe/unsafe methods ?

rscho 4y ago
I don't think it really does. If I remember correctly, there's a bit of white/blacklisting going on under there.
- samatman 4y ago
  Smalltalk code is full of these kinds of unprincipled solutions which work better than they should. You can get away with a lot of saying "just trust me" when everything is exposed for immediate exploration of whether invariants are in fact preserved.
trashburger 4y ago
I also noticed that the reimplementation uses `receiver deepCopy` for each message send to preserve the original object, so that side effects would not affect the receiver.
tonyg 4y ago
The original method finder in squeak has a blacklist of methods not to try, but otherwise works just as you imagine. There's some very cool recent work on isolating effects at a low level that should obviate such grody hacks! Then the system really can freely and safely try all applicable methods. See thread up and down from here https://twitter.com/leastfixedpoint/status/1512391756318392324 https://twitter.com/leastfixedpoint/status/15123917563183923...

melvinroest 4y ago

Pharo recruitment plug: yesplan.be (Belgium) is hiring European Pharo software engineers. If you have little Pharo knowledge that’s fine too, in my (personal) experience, as I am now working with it for 3 months. More on topic: there are many ways in which Pharo can find things that is not possible (or applicable) in other languages. For example, there are 4 mouse clicks you can make in your image: - left click - right click: it shows a context menu And then there are two clicks that I would need my laptop for to (re)figure out. One shows a “halo” around a window. The “halo” gives all kinds of options. The other one shows a context menu that allows you to figure out what objects are running with regards to the pixel you clicked on! Because of the last click, it’s easy-ish to extend your IDE. The last two clicks are some combination of CMD + Option + CTRL + click

VyperCard 4y ago
What is your pay for someone who could write this ten years ago in Amber Smalltalk but had since worked with Python and typescript? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uUOlzr4XdcY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uUOlzr4XdcY Asking for a friend…
- melvinroest 4y ago
  Feel free to email me to have a more in-depth conversation. My email is in my profile.
e12e 4y ago
Interesting, from: https://yesplan.be/en/vacancy/full-stack-software-engineer https://yesplan.be/en/vacancy/full-stack-software-engineer > Our backend uses Pharo Smalltalk, Seaside and GemStone/S How is your experience with GemStone/S?
- melvinroest 4y ago
  For people that don’t know, GemStone is a smalltalk descendant that has an object-oriented database behind it. I don’t know much about GemStone specifics yet, I am about to though. My skillset before this was mostly in React and Node.

tluyben2 4y ago

We have been working for years now on a smalltalk like IDE and a language (which is as language not like smalltalk at all, but as runtime it is). When we went down the rabbithole of prior work (like smalltalk, lisp, etc), it is painful to notice how far we actually have come but how little we actually use / have available to us in mainstream dev. We hope to show how it should be later this year!

arnsholt 4y ago
It's kind of depressing, honestly. Smalltalk is amazing future technology from the 1980s, and here we are in 2022 with our fancy IDEs still dropping off our (metaphorical) punch cards for batch processing.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  Yep... Fairly bizar that a smalltalk env on an old computer is faster for iteration than the modern react/typescript stack. Better errors, easier to debug etc. All because the tooling was from the future. React peeps think hot reload is something special. It was normal and it was faster and more robust than it is now.
  - nyanpasu64 4y ago
    I think there's an inherent conflict between languages creating programs like clay to be molded by the developer and the user, interactively (repl, smalltalk), vs. languages creating programs with optimal machine code with no extraneous computations, and/or maximal low-level control (sometimes even at the cost of making it harder to alter code, like manual data structures or hand-rolled assembly or vectorization). I wouldn't call Smalltalk technology from the future, but rather optimizing for a different ideal (though I've never used Smalltalk to experience the magic firsthand (and/or smoke and mirrors, ctrl+f "white/blacklisting")). Smalltalk (like Java) is bound to a GC, and GC wreaks havoc with using finalizers for manual memory management cleanup, since finalizers can be called while a variable is still in scope unless you use GC.KeepAlive() or friends. On the other hand, optimized C++ is notoriously hard to debug, and debug C++ is slow (especially when using "zero overhead" abstractions that are only zero-overhead in release builds). There's cool work at reversible debugging, binary-patching, etc. (low-overhead tracepoints, Linux kernel Kprobes which failed to hook some functions I think were actually called, CONFIG_DYNAMIC_FTRACE, most recently https://justine.lol/ftrace/ https://justine.lol/ftrace/, though both CONFIG_DYNAMIC_FTRACE and ftrace depend on injecting nops into code which can later be replaced by tracing code). JavaScript excels at neither performance nor dynamism, though I think it's still a lot more dynamic than C++ (userscripts can tamper with page contents and scripting) and faster than Python (through herculean effort of the V8 developers funded by Google ad revenue to make web apps and advertising faster). And C++/assembly, by its nature of allowing complete control over the machine, is difficult to sandbox beyond running code in an isolated process or VM (or compiling to WASM then to x86?), as opposed to JS/WASM being (theoretically) memory-safe and sandboxable by taking away APIs interfacing to the outside world.

bowsamic 4y ago

Does anyone know how to go to a specific implementation of a message for an object? For example can I take "#(1 2 3) min." and go directly to the definition of min? It seems I can only look at _all_ implementations, not just the implementation for that object

throwawayForMe2 4y ago
Use the debugger to step through, and you will see the implementation that is about to be executed? The debugger code itself could give clues on how to do it.

geocar 4y ago

Because it starts out in English and does not say so right away, I think it is a good idea to point out that the article is a google-translate, and seeing it in English I get a different idea in places than when reading the Portuguese. For example, I had never before considered how this feature could help people navigate a foreign language so literally.

prestonh 4y ago

rubyist5eva 4y ago

7 minutes of Pharo Smalltalk for Rubyists -> https://youtu.be/HOuZyOKa91o https://youtu.be/HOuZyOKa91o

jecel 4y ago

The original description of the method finder was by Ted Kaehler in the July 2001 issue of SqueakNews. That electronic magazine was implemented in Squeak, but can now run in your browser thanks to the SqueakJS virtual machine: https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/SqueakNews/index.html https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/SqueakNews/index.html