Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

In most cases, damage from a storm (or earthquake, etc.) is remote - it happens "somewhere else", to people we don't know. As it happens, Frances and Jeanne both came very close to Melbourne Beach, FL, where my parents live. They live over on the ocean side, across the causeway on a barrier island. They still don't have power - but my dad managed to find an internet cafe and sent me this:

That's a shot of what's left of the stairs to the beach. In the background is a partially buried (old) uprooted tree - when I was on that beach in June, that tree was much further back from the water - and there was a much bigger set of dunes. The dunes that protect the island have been chopped down to just about nothing; if they get unlucky enough to get hit again, you could see new inlets over to the Indian River. This set of storms got my attention.

Update: - my parents got off easy. Have a look at this CNN story for an example of how bad some people got hit.

I'm not the only one who's wondering exactly what it is that Jonathan Schwartz has been smoking recently. Go read this Groklaw article - it echos a lot of what I've been posting on the subject. I like this in particular:

I have another suggestion. How about we start calling a patent covenant with Microsoft a patent covenant with Microsoft? When some noticed with concern Sun's "Limited Patent Covenent and Stand-Still Agreement" with Microsoft, filed by Sun as an exhibit with their most recent 10K, whereby Open Office was not protected from patent infringement lawsuits by Microsoft but Star Office was, Mr. Schwartz believes they are just anti-Sun loonies, as he graciously put it on his blog on September 16, in a message to the "Open Office Community":

"Please do not listen to the bizarro numbskull anti-Sun conspiracy theorists. They were lunatics then, they are lunatics now, they will always be lunatics. We love the open source community, we spawned from it. We'll protect that community, that innovation, and our place in it, with all our heart and energy. . . . OpenOffice matters. Moreso every day."

All right. If Exhibit 10.109 doesn't mean what it says, then what does it mean? One possibility is that it means that Sun doesn't want to be legally responsible for work it doesn't control. OK. Why not cover the parts they do and did control? Why not at least cover everything up to the present? And if they don't control it, how come they hold a dual copyright with the Open Office project? They can't have it both ways. If it's theirs, why didn't they protect it along with Star Office? And if it isn't theirs, on what basis do they claim copyright rights? These are not rhetorical questions.

Quick, someone get Schwartz his meds...

I've just slapped up another new development build of BottomFeeder - follow the download links and scroll down to the dev links. Things are looking better - I think it's going to be ready for release soon. There are a few known bugs that I need to iron out, but's getting there. This release will mark a big improvement in the tool.

Smalltalk Solutions 2005 information is up on the StS website - we will have hotel and registration information up soon. The conference will be in Orlando this year, from Monday June 27th to Wednesday June 29th. Bring the whole family next year!

Scoble says this like it's a good thing:

Keith Hurwitz and I tried a little test tonight. He sent me an email protected with our digital rights management (restricted rights built into Outlook). I wanted to see if Kunal's OutlookMT tool would post it. It didn't. Test succeeded!

Does it break copy/paste? Because if it doesn't, it's achieved nothing. If it does, then it'll end up being a true annoyance. There's another question as well - what if you send a DRM marked mail to someone like me who doesn't use Outlook? Does this mean that I simply won't get the mail, or does it mean that the DRM will leak off? You could argue that it's broken either way.

IMHO, this is exactly the wrong way to fight this battle. Tell people that stuff is confidential, and then apply consequences if they violate that trust. This smacks me the same way that "zero tolerance" policies in the schools do - it assumes that everyone is too stupid to use judgement, and instead imposes lame policies on the entire class. Color me entirely unimpressed...

Brian Bommarito is learning Smalltalk and blogging about it. Subscribe to his feed here, and welcome him onboard!

NBC is announcing that Jay Leno is stepping down after his current contract is up (2009) - and being replaced by Conan O'Brien.

Yahoo News picks up the JP Morgan Story

The banking giant used the Smalltalk development suite to develop its 'Kapital' financial risk management and pricing system.

"Smalltalk allowed us to develop Kapital much quicker than other languages would have," said Colin Lewis, vice president of JPMorgan.

"It provides good return on investment and saves costs associated with training and marketing for new products."

JPMorgan had estimated that to build Kapital in another language would have required at least three times the amount of resources to develop and maintain the application.

Lewis added that the Smalltalk part of its systems requires very little modification across differing operating systems - the bank uses Solaris, Windows NT and Linux.

"Portability and stability is a big issue for us," he said in a statement.

Smalltalk, explained its developer Cincom Systems, is based on 'pure' object-oriented techniques, and is easy for developers to use because it requires no in-depth knowledge of programming languages.

Lambda the Ultimate links to an interesting article discussing types, modules, and objects. take this, for instance:

Smalltalk-80 was an important and enlightening experiment in just how far object-orientation can be taken in a programming language. It is simple, compact, and shows a rare and refreshing integrity of concept. To accomplish its goals, it introduces the idea that the variables of a class can be either class variables or instance variables, and the methods can be either class methods or instance methods. This turns the class into a mixture of two fundamentally different concepts - type and module - with very different semantics. Smalltalk manages to do this relatively cleanly.

Unfortunately, two more recent languages, C++ and Java, have taken this same distinction and turned it into a gratuitous mess. Let's look just at these two languages for a moment, then come back to Smalltalk.

The author then goes on to demonstrate how the consistency of Smalltalk makes it simpler than the alternatives. I do have a quibble on one thing:

Smalltalk pays a high price elsewhere for taking object orientation to the extreme, notably in complete loss of static typing and serious runtime efficiency penalties. Special, one-instance forms of classes are, for many programming problems, not as good a conceptual match as modules. But at least it provides a single, consistent, and syntactically explicit call mechanism.

That's simply not the case. Smalltalk doesn't suffer from "serious runtime efficiency penalties" - arithmetic can be slower in Smalltalk (although it need not be - see the work done on StrongTalk, for instance) It's an interesting article either way

Via BobCongdon comes a link to a bloody version of smack the penguin. Watch him bounce and leave a trail of blood...

Thanks to Michael, we now have a cleaner browsing experience in the development versions of BottomFeeder. Michael integrated an interface to LibTidy, a nice library that cleans up nasty html. For now, you'll want to grab the rev of the library that's appropriate to your OS; when I package this all up, I'll bundle libraries for all the platforms I can. There are going to be a few missing - and I have no way to build a rev of the library for those platforms. The good news is, we still have support for parsing HTML in Smalltalk, just not as cleanly as LibTidy does - so it'll all work even if you don't have it installed

In the comments, Rich asks what LibTidy does. It's an "HTML Cleaner", more or less. It takes HTML as input, and outputs a cleaned up XHTML document - unclosed tags closed, etc. - which makes for far easier document handling. It's also a good example of reuse - instead of spending time writing such a thing in Smalltalk, I'm just using something that already exists.

It's interesting that I ran across this post on HTML Tidy - because it's quite possible that it will be part of BottomFeeder shortly. We are still testing it out, but things look positive.

Dare Obasanjo points out how some feeds follow the RSS specs (in so far as you can call them specs, but never mind) exactly - but end up creating a nightmare for aggregators and the users who use them. He points to a specific feed, and tells us exactly what's wrong with it - specifically, the issue of using the same link for multiple items (without a GUID being present):

Now how does the RSS aggregator tell whether the item with the title "I am item 1" is the same as the one named "I am item one" with a typo in the title fixed or a different one?  The simple answer is that it can't. A naive hack is to look at the content of the element to see if it is the same but what happens when a typo was fixed or some update to the content of the ?

Every RSS aggregator has some sort of hack to deal with this problem. I describe them as hacks because there is no way that an aggregator can 100% accurately determine when items with the same link and no guid are the same item with content changed or different items. This means the behavior of different aggregators with feeds such as the Cafe con Leche RSS feed is extremely inconsistent.

This is the sort of thing that drives us aggregator authors nuts. Presumably, authors want their content to be read. Is there a reason that some of them have to make it so blasted hard?

I expect everyone in Florida is suffering from Hurricane fatigue - certainly my parents (currently holed up in an Orlando hotel) are - Frances and Jeanne both came very close to Melbourne Beach, where they live. I've been watching coverage of the storm on the various cable channels - a few minutes ago, MSNBC was showing video of damages to the Eae Gallie causeway. I've driven down that road many times; now there's a boat smashing up against the side of it and debris all over it - not to mention the flooding of the approaches. It's a little odd looking at damage to areas you know well. Here's hoping that Florida doesn't have any more of these to deal with this year.

Jonathan Schwartz has an interesting article up on grid computing - Sun sells a service based solution here, and it might fit some people's needs. It's not as simple as he makes out though:

So when we announced our $1/cpu/hour pricing for our N1 Grid (as opposed to the ever so slightly different ones everyone seems to be building), we knew we'd strike a chord. Why build and operate what Sun could deliver as a web service? Priced by the drink, no less.

So we're now engaged with a growing population of companies to talk about leveraging an "on demand grid" for their workloads. We're also engaged with a number of CIO's who've asked their teams to benchmark their internal compute grids against $1/cpu/hr. All in, all up, at least there's now a benchmark. If they buy from us, they can simply turn the bill over to their internal clients.

And if nothing else, we've now put a stake in the ground. If you're paying more than $1/cpu/hour, odds are you're overpaying (and possibly overbuilding - another customer told me utilization in their xSeries blade farm was below 10%!).

That's hardly the only issue. If I have a complex set of calculations to offload, then I rather suspect that performance issues are one of the things I need to worry about (on Wall Street, I happen to know that this is the case). In that event, a web services accessible grid may not cut it - the network is still a whole lot slower than the local cpu. It all depends on the job and bandwidth of course - the faster the network connection gets, the more easily possible this may be - it may turn out that Sun and Schwartz are actually on to something with this idea. We'll see how it turns out.

Another day, another hurricane strike for Florida. From the reporting, it looks like a lot of the residents are starting to get evacuation fatigue; i.e., they are planning to ride this one out. That's probably a mistake - it's a Category 3 now, and could get stronger yet. There's also the fact that the Dunes got lowered on a lot of the barrier islands by Frances.... this could be very dangerous. My folks are heading out again; everyone else should as well.

I think I underestimated the level of pain in New England after last night's game. Go over here to the Globe's coverage and see just how far into the Sox' heads the Yankees have gotten. Interestingly enough, last night's game was the 1918th game between the two team.... spooky :)

This post is an example of how a good RSS tool can help you find problems quickly. I have to give credit to feedster for this one - I use a feedster RSS search in BottomFeeder, and that's how I ran across Gary's problem. I have a search set up for the word "Smalltalk", and that's how I find things like Gary's post. If you're in a position like mine and you aren't using an aggregator and Feedster to track your product - you must be nuts.

That thud you heard earlier this evening was the Red Sox losing to the Yankees. You can feel the pain in the Boston papers already. On to the playoffs - it's about time for another Yankees Series victory. But wait! It wouldn't be an end of year Yankees/Red Sox series without some classic Sox screw ups:

With an eerie similarity to last year's postseason debacle, Pedro Martinez took a lead into the eighth inning before tiring and the New York Yankees rallied past Boston 6-4 Friday night to open a 5.5-game advantage in the AL East.

Grady Little was the Red Sox manager last fall when he left Martinez in during the eighth inning of Game 7 in the AL championship series; the Yankees overcame a 5-2 deficit to tie it and earned a World Series berth when Aaron Boone homered in the 11th.

Little was let go after the season and replaced by Terry Francona. But Francona, much as his predecessor did, sent Martinez (16-8) back out for the eighth despite needing 101 pitches to get through the first seven innings; the Boston fans let Francona hear about it, much as they did for his predecessor.

Heh

Larry McCay of SDTimes has an interesting comparison of XP (Extreme Programming) to the Scientific Method:

XP builds on best practices such as unit testing, pair programming and refactoring. The basic principles of XP are communication, simplicity, feedback and courage; applying the methodology goes through the following five steps:

1. Choose story.
2. Write tests.
3. Run tests.
4. Refine, program and refactor 14repeat as needed.
5. Go to step 1, repeat until all stories are complete.

Let's compare against the Scientific Method, which was first introduced by Francis Bacon. It was not used as a strict discipline until Isaac Newton later in the 17th century.

The goal of the Scientific Method is to provide a set of steps to ensure the development of provable theories that may lead to new and greater understandings of the workings of nature and its systems. These theories are gradually stepped up in generality until the highest level, at which point there may be opportunity for unification of theories.

The Scientific Method consists of six steps, and you can see the similarity with XP:

1. Make observations.
2. Create hypotheses.
3. Make predictions.
4. Conduct experiments.
5. Modify hypotheses if predictions are not met and go to step 3.
6. Declare hypothesis as theory.

Go read the whole thing - it's an interesting article.

Sometimes, I really wonder how a columnist manages to get paid for their writing. Take this eWeek column by Jim Rapoza, for instance. It's supposedly about RSS, but it could be about anything - it's filled with platitudes, very light on real information. After reading it, I'm not convinced that Rapoza has the slightest idea what RSS is:

One of the main benefits of RSS is its simplicity. In minutes, I can write an RSS file to syndicate a column or blog, and there are tools that make this process even easier. But the simplicity of RSS also means that it doesn't have a whole lot of intelligence over its delivery.

Many large sites that deliver RSS feeds recently started complaining that they are being hit every hour with a flood of reader requests that is, for all intents and purposes, the same thing as a denial-of-service attack. This happens because most RSS readers are pretty dumb about when they check for updates, and there's little the server can do to control this.

The dreaded "RSS is DDOS" rears it's head. Odd - Slashdot somehow manages to deal with badly behaved clients - there are, in fact, solutions to this problem (if there weren't, massively popular sites like Yahoo and Slashdot would have folded up eons ago). But hey, those paragraphs show some passing familiarity with a recent wave of blather. What about this?

But this is also that time when many of the problems and deficiencies in RSS will be discovered, and enterprise users of RSS will expect these problems to be fixed as soon as possible. If the developers and caretakers of RSS are unable or unwilling to do this, many companies may decide to take a pass on the technology.

So, to those developing products that use RSS: Find ways now to address some of RSS' shortcomings and dig for problems heretofore unknown so the technology doesn't become a burden on those who decide to use it. To the RSS community: Find a way to work together to create one standard, which will be much more robust and responsive than multiple competing standards.

Insert almost any topic from the last 30 years in the IT sector, and you could write those two paragraphs. It was a stock column, with the acronym RSS copy/pasted in. What a waste of pixels...

You can stick a fork in it - the itanium is dead. HP just bailed, leaving intel holding the bag on a chip no one wants. Apparently, InfoWorld's Tom Yager hasn't gotten the memo yet

As you know, we offer a free download of our Cincom Smalltalk product (both VisualWorks and ObjectStudio). There's also an ESUG CD out there with just VW NC on it - it's come to my attention that there's an installer problem with that CD. You can grab a known good installation from our site.

Stephanne Ducasse has gotten permission to post the "Green Book" - Bits of History, Words of Advice by Glenn Krasner. Kudos to Stef for making this happen!

JP Morgan has been a long time user of our product (and of Gemstone Smalltalk as well). They've agreed to talk about their applications - here's what they do (1.1MB, PDF). Enjoy!

In the news:

• PC Magazine UK
• Infomatics

This is subject to evolutionary changes, but here's a product roadmap for Cincom Smalltalk. As always, contact me with any questions

I'm in the process of uploading another development version of BottomFeeder for download. This is under the dev download links, and is still considered to be beta code. I've extended the application level support for style sheets - users can now switch amongst available ones (and new ones can be added to the 'stylesheets' directory). I'll post an update when the files are live on the server.

Update: Grab the dev downloads now

We've got a Wiki Page that I keep updated on what's coming. This release should be out in late November (possibly early December) of this year:

Cincom Smalltalk November 2004 is a major release for both VisualWorks and ObjectStudio. The main features we intend to add:

VisualWorks 7.3

• VM
• Preview Support for 64 bit platforms - we intend to have preview (beta) support for the AMD Opteron, the 64 bit Xeon, and the Sparc 64 bit platform. Other platforms (such as the G5 and the HP PA) will follow. This will be a full 64 bit implementation, not simply 32 bit on the 64 bit platforms. Some of what should be there:
• The 64-bit implementation uses full 64-bit adresses for objects, providing the ability to fill the entire available address space with objects
• The immediate floating-point format should provide a very usable range which, although it will be able to overflow to full 64-bit boxed Doubles, should overflow rarely in practice, providing much faster and much more space-affordable floating-point
• Shared Perm space on all 64 bit platforms - which means a much lighter weight server deployment
• The C connect in the 64-bit implementation is a full 64-bit ABI and consequently removes the annoying limitations people have encountered when trying to run the 32-bit system on 64-bit Solaris linking (or rather not being able to link) against 64-bit libraries.
• The two systems are code compatible in that the bytecode is exactly the same between the two systems, so parcels load unchanged and can be freely exchanged between 32-bit and 64-bit systems.
• We will support the ability to develop either in 64-bit or in 32-bit and deploy in the other width
• More details to follow as they become available
• Store
• Store Packages/Bundles into the base. This will mean eliminating categories and parcels as a separate view, and showing a unified package view of the product - whether you use a store repository or not
• Store will support atomic loading of packages/bundles when loading via source. At present, atomic loading only happens with packages store binary - this will change in 7.3
• Store will support file attachments - so you'll be able to include image files, ssp files (etc) when versioning. This will allow you to manage all project artifacts in Store.
• Better version support for packages. At present, one can make a package depend on another package, but not properly dependent on a specific version of another package. This support will enable us to introduce an important change in VisualWorks deployments - post 7.3, we will support (some) new packages on older versions of the base product. As an example, you'll be able to load a newer revision of a major component (Opentalk, Web Toolkit, etc.) on older versions of the product without upgrading the entire product suite.
• Base System
• Full Unicode (font) Support for Windows and Mac OS9 (These will probably remain in preview, but will be improved from the 7.2 release) - Mac OS X is planned, but will not make the current release cycle. This is currently Windows only
• An initial definition of a Smalltalk Runtime Environment. One of the most common issues people have with Smalltalk is the difficulty in packaging - with this release, we will start supporting build up rather than strip down, with a standard deployment system
• .NET Connect
• This component is currently in preview (beta). For the 7.3 release, it will be fully supported. It is possible that .NET Events and WinForms will be supported within this component
• Distribution
• VisualWorks will have a 2 way wizard for dealing with web services - you'll be able to point and click your way to a server and/or client interface very easily, with all the heavy lifting done by the tools.
• SNMP support should stabilize with better ASN.1 parsing
• We will support an Opentalk IIOP at Preview (beta) level. There may well not be a complete implementation (value types in particular). This work will lead to (not in this release) suppport for RMI over IIOP. More details will follow as they become available
• We will have a connection to MQS (IBM Messaging) in preview. This is stable, and in use by customers - but we do not have time for a full review before it is integrated into a supported state. That should happen in 7.3.1 or 7.4
• Internationalization
• We will have better support in the base system for Asian locales. A few Locales will ship with the commercial product, and will be available for NC on request.
• Documentation
• SmalltalkDoc - A new initiative to provide reference documentation for VisualWorks. This may only make it to preview status, depending on how much work gets done on this as opposed to the existing documentation

ObjectStudio 7.0

• Full Unicode support
• Full support for the XML package that was originally developed for VisualWorks
• Full support for Opentalk, which enables object level communication between VisualWorks and ObjectStudio
• We are investigating some exciting possibilities for ObjectStudio which I am not (yet) prepared to reveal publically. Stay tuned!

Further details to come

Here's a great quote from a .NET vs. J2EE debate:

Visual Studio, like Visual Basic and other Microsoft development tools and languages, provide ease of use and a low learning curve at a price: They don't impose any kind of discipline or framework, making it too easy to crank out poorly designed apps and horrid code. This is not helped by all the amateur Visual Basic/Studio "developers" out there who have no understanding of basic comp sci concepts. (Luckily, we don't hire those kind of developers, but I'm sure we've all worked with many of them in the past.)

On the other hand, J2EE by its nature imposes some rigid rules and forces one to use some kind of a framework to deliver an enterprise level app. This takes more time, planning, and skill. As a result, though, J2EE apps, by comparison, tend to be more robust, maintainable, and scalable. This is not to say that .NET apps cannot have those qualities as well -- it just takes a lot more discipline and some self-imposed rules to achieve this -- Visual Studio doesn't give you that out of the box.

That's the mindset in too many parts of this industry - if it's simple, it can't be good. Or it won't scale. Or something. Of course, while the two pirates of complexity duke it out, people who want real productivity and simplicity can look over here. I'll be doing live updates and debugging live code in the meantime...

All of us have been in this conversation before. Heh.

I've got With Style into BottomFeeder now - and things are looking better. I've got all the obvious (well, at least to me :) ) bugs ironed out - there's a problem with the new http layer prompting for username/password on auth pages when it shouldn't, but we'll track that down. What's new?

• Support for user defined style sheets. Users can define their own style sheets and save them to a specific directory - and switch them at runtime. I'll be providing a few simple ones
• Better html display. This is the primary benefit of using WithStyle - better display.

I've just posted an update that fixes a few issues with newspaper view. Bear in mind that this new build is still a development build - backup your data before you try it out.

Good gosh, someone call Buffy - Ivan just won't die. After swinging into the Atlantic last week, it went south again, into the gulf of Mexico, and is gathering strength.

Based on the comments to this post, it's obvious that I was not clear. It's not that the mac UI is unstable; far from it. Our current VM for the OS X platform is unstable. We are going to stopgap that problem by using our X11 based engine for the time being

We get asked about the performance of VW on the OS X platform a lot. Yes, we recognize that what we have out there now really isn't acceptable. In 7.3 (out late November this year), we are addressing this.

At the moment, the OS X version of VW uses the native Window system (as it does on all platforms) to open Windows and to make low level graphics calls (for the emulated GUI). On OS X, we the native interface has not been stable enough. In 7.3, we are instead going to rely on X11 on the OS X platform. The good news is that this results in a far more stable product - the bad news is, you have to have X11 installed for this to work.

X11 ships with OS X, so if you don't have it installed, it should be easily accessible. Yes, we realize that this is not an ideal solution - and we intend to revisit this choice when we do native widget support (post Pollock, in the future). In the meantime, it's the fastest route to a far more stable OS X platform.

I've posted another dev build of BottomFeeder - this looks a lot better than the build I posted last week. It's still a dev build - this is not yet a full new release. So if you grab this one, be aware that there are still some rough edges. As I mentioned in my last post on this, back up the old executable (or image), and the contents of the 'app' and 'btfSave' directories before you try this build

I ran across Gary Short's points on Smalltalk usage yesterday - he makes some valid observations:

As I've said before, I learned to program in Smalltalk and it remains my favourite programming environment. So, having said that, why do I earn my living programming in a Microsoft environment?

Well the answer's in the question really - it's because I want to be able to earn a living. Here in the UK there's a well known website called Jobserve that has job postings for different IT jobs, (among other things). A simple search for Smalltalk this morning yielded just 13 hits, UK wide, for the last 7 days. A similar search for .Net yielded over 1500 hits.

Yes, that's a problem - and one the vendors - like Cincom - need to help address. At the same time, some of the effort has to drop back to developers who say that Smalltalk is their favorite language. I don't expect developers to "go to the mat" to bring Smalltalk into a shop - far from it. On the other hand, I would expect them to at least bring it up, and ask that Smalltalk be evaluated when new projects come up. Not all the heavy lifting can be done from this end...

Ted Neward identifies the vendor adoption problem with WS protocols:

Here's the deal: Amazon, Yahoo, eBay and others are all finding that trying to implement production-quality Web services right now is Hard Thing To Do. The tool stacks are still half-baked, the standards aren't really ubiquitous nor widely-supported yet (c'mon, folks, we're still seeing vendor implementations that are choosing the WS-I-obsoleted SOAP 1.1 Spec over the WS-I-approved SOAP 1.2 version, we're clearly not keeping up with the spec movement), and the specs just keep coming, and coming and coming. If these companies, whose very business depends on both the traditional consumer chain transforming into a more lucrative business-to-business chain, are finding that the WS-* stack is failing them, what chance do the rest of us have of making all this stuff work?

The problem is in the the specs keep coming and coming part. Look, here's a tip - keeping up with the WS standards isn't the only thing on a vendor's queue. I've said before that Web Services is the new CORBA - and this is more proof. Back in the 90's, the OMG churned rapidly with specs no one cared about. The web services folks seem to think that's a model worth striving for. Slow down, and actually think about what you're doing, instead of just adding specs "because you can".

In the meantime, many of the vendors will be solving actual problems they have with actual customers and prospects...