Smalltalk config candour

What follows is my reply to an exasperated Smalltalker :

CC  rider : config issues are as old as commercial Smalltalk ; I keep an entire mail bin of these (separate from 'user' or 'tips' conversations.) At least this is not

                    eclipse+CVS+Java+open-source !

I work in a very advanced commercial OOP created by MIT Lisp gurus and THAT IDE has package circularity issues that have to be addressed by developers who push beyond the pre-tested envelope.

Does the issue exist for commercial PROLOG implementations with packages ? That would be amusing .... (there had been SOUL and QSOUL projects for Squeak as well as a Prolog and then Lisp for Squeak )

I would not be surprised to find packaging issues with functors in Mozart/Oz ! And I could check the Mercury dev mailing list ... (Mercury - which can gen Erlang code ! )

The Puppy Linux folks have a real challenge in getting tools into their light Linux ... but so far so good (mostly) - I say "mostly" as I cannot get the ObjectIcon IDE to run in their JWM X ... but Icon with objects could be used to address that very config issue in a maintainable, readable fashion !!!

Practical computing : tasks which keep our sense of irony well-honed ;-) (even without management)

Needed : Pre-Factoring browsers ! ;-)

and please do keep smiling ... but only if the crows' feet crinkle at the edges of the temples ...

Atheism and the librarians

While we don't know which books Palin wanted to ban from her town library, book banning and burning is not the only issue we may face.

Here in Hennepin County, Minnesota, in the US Midwest, my county library holds most every book in the Cambridge "Companion" Series but one: The Cambridge Companion To Atheism.  Oddly enough, the author, Michael Martin, Boston U. Professor emeritus of philosophy, Harvard Ph.D. has another book missing from the collection, his Atheism. A Philosophical Justification.

Although both of these books with "Atheism" in the title are available at Amazon or your local bookstore, the librarian with whom I spoke seemed satisfied than within the county holdings (which now include the Minneapolis Public Library) there are 136 books under that subject keyword of "atheism".

So when I got home and back on the internet I checked the Subject keyword "Christianity": 5190 titles.  That ratio alone is 0.0262 which might seem fitting if there were about 2% non-theists in our county -  if that were a valid measure.  I tried "Christian": 11106; Islam: 1268; Buddhist: 475; Judaism: 1946 - and now we are on the order of 20,000 to 100 or 200 to 1 and I am still counting ...

This is the USA, where Bertrand Russell once had trouble with permission to deliver a lecture at Columbia, as I recall - one nation under God. America where we are told that no single non-criminal epithet is so derogatory as "atheist".  What if you child married an atheist!?!

By looking for books by various authors, I think that I could bring the number of books devoted to non-theism up to the order of 300.  Let's suppose that I could bring it up to 1000.  If I add in the new wave of Christian fiction, Christian music I suspect that the 20k would creep towards another order of magnitude - and if the same criterion for non-theist were applied to classify books as theist, will this would start to look grim.

The books are available through inter-library loan from some local colleges and universities.

But one last sanity check:  astrology: 536; tarot: 164; psychic: 562 - and even supposing some overlap, we already have a discrepancy of an order of magnitude.

Not that the subject catalog keyword search is definitive, as we have Bible: 5357 but religion: 5316 but religious: 9297

Oh, and not to forget the philosopher Jesus, Himself: a mere 2319.

exposing slim Liquid Rebol

The dataflow framework for Rebol is called Liquid and is available from rebol.org as a SLiM library.

If you are new to this as I am, it is not obvious how to proceed.

First you need both slim.r and liquid.r

Slim can be found at rebol.org in the scripts.
You can download liquid or retrieve it from the Rebol console by visiting Liquid
to either get the file or run the one-line script at the Rebol console.

Start by loading SLiM with

do %slim.r

and then try

do %liquid.r

The important liquid function is liquify. An attempt at

source liquify

or

help liquify

will show that nothing is yet available.

Start by checking the SLiM paths with

slim/paths

which should be an empty block.

I am using local code (liquid.r and slim.r are in my Rebol directory) so I just do this:

slim/paths: [%.]

Now I check my SLiM path to liquid this way:

slim/find-path %liquid.r

which gives me my Rebol path.
Now I can do the two key bits:

lq: slim/open 'liquid none ; gets any version

and then expose that lq library with

slim/expose lq none ; replace none later with a blk of funcs

Now you can test with a simple test for the liquify true? function with

source true?

You are now ready to use the liquid documentation at Steel quickstart or the Steel Liquid page.