Planet Smalltalk

So now that v1.0 alpha is done, it's time to think about the v1.0 beta features. There are only three such things.

• Explicit support for validation services.
• Comparison validation.
  
• A serious benchmark evaluator.

The first two should be easy to do. The last one, however, will require significant thought.

Christopher Hitchens, who supports the Iraq war, but is critical of many aspects of the Bush administration has done something which I think is amazing, admirable and enlightening

He wanted to be able to assess whether waterboarding was torture and so he organised himself to be waterboarded and has written not just a descriptive but also a reflective piece about it - and also released a video of the event

Believe me, it's torture (article)
on the waterboard (video)

Some might dismiss this as a publicity stunt or as a way for an already controversial character to become more controversial and widely read. That may be partially true - (nevertheless, I admire his guts for submitting himself to something which he now acknowledges is torture) - but read page 2 of Hitchens' article where he canvasses in detail the two opposing opinions of whether the United States should use waterboarding. I won't quote since to do this topic justice you need to read the whole of Hitchens' article. The deeply reflective aspect of Hitchen's writing, which is always present, should not be missed in this case.

Smalltalk programmers have, for a long time, looked at their Smalltalk image with mixed feelings. They were happy to immerse themselves in the world of objects and learned to live in it like a dolphin in the ocean (which, as you know, was originally a land animal, turning to the sea), and make grateful use of the facilities it offered because code, applications, and objects lived in the same space happily together.
They were also slightly envious of other, less productive languages, where you could start anew with something like:

   main()
     {

... and then the world of possibilities would be endless... until of course the world of problems created by exponential complexity would overwhelm you...
While there is a Smalltalk focussing more on scripting abilities ( GNU Smalltalk ) and doing a great job of it too, as a rule Smalltalk adheres to the "object world" structure.
The question rose to my mind: is this such a problem? Can it not be that this is a good thing?
The Smalltalk image as a miniature world of objects, residing on what might be called a Smalltalk node, may very well be precisely the concept that can transform the web into something useful and propel it into the "next phase". As can be seen in cloud computing, the web is gradually moving toward a distributed model, in which even things like backups become things of the past because everything is everywhere. The original model of redundancy of the Internet, put into it by requirements from the US DoD which funded the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet that specified it should be able to survive a nuclear attack, can easily be recognised in this.
However, what is running at the moment on these many nodes realising the Google File System or Amazon S3 , is code . Not objects . Properly recognised as a requisite for these clouds, the code is written in dynamic languages, but still: the code is not the thing. It needs writing, compiling, testing, and deploying. What is worse: it needs to do this outside the runtime environment. It needs rigorous processes to keep them under control - it needs control in the first place.
What if we had Smalltalk images running on thousands, millions of nodes? What if we had to think about communicating between worlds of objects instead of between ip addresses, interfaces, service connectors? Can we not envision an object cloud as much more efficient, much more scalable, and most importantly: with many more capabilities? It is alive at the higher and at the lower levels of abstraction.
Smalltalk systems have already been built using a network of Smalltalk images. Some of them even quite large ¹.
The important thing to realise is that with Smalltalk we have a technology that can scale up as well as down: Smalltalk images, including all tools needed to access the objects in it, can be created to fit in a 5 MB memory space or even much smaller, with room for applications. This may have been large 20 years ago, but has now become a commodity on the smallest mobile devices.
An issue that we may need to tackle as Smalltalkers is the operating systems. Smalltalk has originally been conceived as operating system, development environment and application environment in one. More and more I begin to realise that, if we want to get Smalltalk to as many devices as we can, we must consider the option of what I call hijacking the hardware : to offer users the possibility of running Smalltalk directly on the hardware. This also raises all kinds of issues with licences and such - vendors may not be particularly enamoured with the fact that their software is thrown in the garbage bin (take Nokia or Apple), but then of course the Linuxes have taken this path before.
Already we are seeing moves in this direction ². And I am convinced these are only the first signs of a greater change. Watch Smalltalk!

Of course, the famous quote from Scott McNealy, chairman and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, "you have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.", has mostly been repeated out of context. But it created quite a stir at the time, almost a decade ago. Since then the situation regarding privacy has increasingly changed in a direction that most would describe as worse. I am not sure I would - although it certainly is not an easy subject and I hope not to simplify it too much in this blog.
But, in short, I guess I am advocating the end of privacy.

Looks like Squeak is running on iTouch systems. Found on #DNU.

Assessments has reached 1.0 alpha 1. This means it's feature complete as per the 1.0 spec: it provides all the major features of SUnit / SUnitVM, it is able to run existing SUnit / SUnit VM tests (and benchmarks and validators) without causing code change to occur to existing tests, and its design is oriented towards flexibility for future enhancements.

• 148 classes.
• 1008 methods.
• ~6.81 methods per class on average.

I will ship this code base to the beta testers du jour, and start working on the final annoyances that are left. I am basically done. I can't believe it.

Update: an additional method fixes the only known annoyance in this source code base, thus making 1.0 alpha 2.

• 148 classes.
• 1009 methods.
• ~6.82 methods per class on average.
  

Sure, why not... let's go out to the wilderness and don't do anything for a while. And yet, I knew I was lying to myself. I predicted I wouldn't last even 3 days before I'd be compelled to go create new things.

Indeed. Today for example. I had been doing little things in the last 2 days, and the stuff ready for coding piled up quickly. Yesterday I had a design session for the Smalltalks 2008 coding contest, and this caused even more implementation details to appear out of thin air. All of this material is going to my queue of things to do, and now I cannot take this anymore. I need to finish Assessments and push the size of the queue back down. Hopefully I'll be done within the next 4 hours. We'll see how it goes...

Update A1: 130 minutes later, Assessments has native validation facilities. Next up, the SUnit Validation bridge. 148 classes, exactly 1000 methods, ~6.76 methods / class.

Update A2: a few minutes later, some refactoring, cleanup and bug fixes resulted in the overall deletion of one method. 148 classes, 999 methods, 6.75 methods / class.

Update B: 25 minutes after update A1, some 165 minutes since I started, Assessments runs existing validators successfully. What's funny is that the assessment checklist uses the bridged validator to run the tests :). Some small issues remain, but it's nothing serious.