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fstephanyon Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

Yes, the project was born in Liège University in Belgium.

The name they chose for their programs are quite funny with belgian references: SPECULOOS[0] and TRAPPIST[1].

There are 11 trappist beers in the world (of which 6 are brewed in Belgium). Speculoos is a Dutch/Belgian cookie.

[0]: http://www.speculoos.ulg.ac.be/cms/c_3272698/en/speculoos-po... [1]: http://www.trappist.ulg.ac.be/cms/c_3300885/en/trappist-port...

fstephanyon Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

I'm using a Thinkpad T460 with the latest Ubuntu and everything works out of the box. Even the smartcard reader works with my ID to sign my tax form.

Battery life is 12-14 hours of real work with the big battery (which costs something like 18$ more than the regular one).

I still use a Macbook Air for iOS development but I now boot the Thinkpad for everything else.

(Oh and if there's an engineer working for Spotify in the crowd, thanks for the Linux app!)

fstephanyon Why I'm Not a React Native Developer

Yes.

fstephanyon GNU Artanis: A web framework for Guile Scheme

What's your programming background?

fstephanyon Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

Is it not what Google is currently doing with Android?

fstephanyon Pharo 4.0 Released

Basically all Smalltalker do live coding. It's not live coding in the sense of building a scene or composing music tough.

The parent probably means live coding his app. If you do Ruby, think about creating your whole program in IRB. You can dump the memory anytime and reload the dump to continue from where you left.

Coding in IRB means that you have access to all the introspection and dynamic analysis while you're coding.

fstephanyon Pharo 4.0 Released

Right, a lot of Smalltalker would love native windows. It's a requirement for some companies as well.

Edit: not only for the look but also for the feel. I hate when my usual keyboard shortcuts do something different in Pharo than in my OS.

fstephanyon Pharo 4.0 Released

They hesitate to include "Spur", a new memory manager in the VM. Check Clement Bera's blog post for more: https://clementbera.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/7-points-summar...

This is the first step towards a 64bits VM (yay!)

fstephanyon Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition

I couldn't find a way to introduce my VAT number.

If I'm a business with a valid VAT number outside Spain, I shouldn't pay the VAT, right?

fstephanyon New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

You're right. Territory invasion is unlikely but preserving the dollar is probably another story.

fstephanyon The Smalltalk Revolution

Dependency management: Metacello does that. Even though it's not as neat and easy as Bundler or Gradle/MavenCentral it does the job. There are no centralized place à la RubyGems/CPAN/Cocoapod so it can be messy to locate up-to-date packages.

Source code control: Yep. There's a slow transition from Monticello to Git but tools are still subpar. Trying to integrate thing that are not Smalltalk code into monticello is a pain.

Continuous integration: Yep. Everything is doable from the command line. The Pharo guys actually build everything with Jenkins (https://ci.inria.fr/pharo/).

Deployment: I use ansible to provision my server and to deploy webapps. Nothing really fancy (https://github.com/fstephany/hello-pharo/).

My everyday job involves Ruby+Rails, Objective-C and Android development.

Programming in Pharo Smalltalk feels much better than any of those but in the end of the day, those tools get us faster at the results our clients want (usually some kind of mobile app with a backend).

fstephanyon Rails Translation made _(“simple”)

Can I use the app with another stack? I know i'll give up some niceties but the app seems good enough to use even without Rails...

fstephanyon Nokia 215

I used to tether the 3.5G connection with Bluetooth with my Nokia 515. It worked quite well.

fstephanyon Permissions asked for by Uber Android app

No.

fstephanyon Kotlin: Statically typed programming language targeting the JVM and JS

This is great to hear. Thanks!

fstephanyon Kotlin: Statically typed programming language targeting the JVM and JS

It seems that they don't advertise Android support on the website. Is it dropped?

More info here: http://blog.andresteingress.com/2013/12/13/programming-andro...

And there: http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2013/08/working-with-kotlin...

fstephanyon Firefox OS phones now available from Geeksphone

Same here.

Another problem: They charge VAT even if you have a valid non-spanish VAT number.

I guess it's a pretty wild day for a small company :p

fstephanyon A new Light Table experience

Yep, mostly ClojureScript and a bit of Javascript for boot and setup.

fstephanyon Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

Right. I'm currently on a work-holiday visa in Canada (BC). I went to an ER and had to pay ~$825 upfront, before seeing a doctor.

My travel insurance reimbursed everything but you'd better have money on your credit card...

Before getting my work holiday visa, I had to prove that I had medical insurance covering me during my stay in Canada.

[edit: I'm from Belgium]

fstephanyon With $42M more, 10gen wants to take MongoDB mainstream

Right, the schemaless and native JSON are the main reason I switched my products to MongoDB. Scalability is not an issue for 99% of the projects i've worked on.

Easier mapping between my domain model (I mainly use Smalltalk) and the persistence is a huge win.

fstephanyon Light Table - a new IDE concept

https://github.com/CampSmalltalk/Cypress

Hopefully this project will take off :)

Smalltalk vendors will probably add a layer of Envy/Store/Monticello on top of it but that would be a giant step forward.

fstephanyon Light Table - a new IDE concept

Looks gorgeous!

Interestingly, the whole idea of "the environment (and the IDE) is dynamic" is present in almost any Smalltalk dialect.

The file is just a convenient way to serialize the code but is not necessary for the act of programming.

Damn, I was expecting this from Ruby, I thought Clojurers were happy to use emacs :p

fstephanyon An open letter to Stripe: please come to Europe

What are the current options in Canada ? I'm moving to Vancouver next month (coming from Belgium) and wonder how the tech/startup looks like there...

fstephanyon Ask HN: European startup looking for a service for recurring billing

That's what we are using for our app (http://laskuapp.com). We are based in Belgium. The process with wirecard was quite long but went smoothly and the people we were in contact with were super friendly.

fstephanyon [dead]

The beep is plain awesome.

fstephanyon Which Smalltalk?

You don't have distinction between runtime and development time. Which means you can debug live. It's a bit like being logged in an IRB session on your rails application. Except that you have better tools than a plain command line.

Ruby feels closer to Smalltalk than Obj-C to me.

If you're familiar with Cocoa/Obj-C, you can have a look at http://www.fscript.org/

fstephanyon Squeak 4.0 released - now under MIT/Apache license - The H Open Source

If you haven't already, you should have a look at the free Pharo by Example book. http://www.pharobyexample.org/

The Blue Book (Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation by Adele Goldberg and David Robson) is quite old but still one of the best book about Smalltalk. You can get it for free in PDF.