[Cuis-dev] ODBC error

[Mark Volkmann]

I apologize if the way I worded my question came across as rude. That was
certainly not my intent. I think I should explain why I've tried to be a
part of the Cuis Smalltalk community for the past eight months or so.

I'm pretty new to Smalltalk and it turns out I love it. And so far Cuis
Smalltalk is my favorite distribution.

Early in my learning I had a lot of beginner questions for which I failed
to easily find answers. So I frequently asked questions on this mailing
list. Over time I learned that doing that is frowned on and there is a high
expectation that beginners will read through the source code and try hard
to find answers on their own. I've tried hard to do that, but haven't
always been successful.

I decided that I wanted to help future beginners find the answers to all
the questions I had more easily. So I started documenting everything I
learned about Smalltalk at https://mvolkmann.github.io/blog/ (select
Smalltalk in the left nav to see a long list of subtopics). As you can see,
I have spent a large amount of time on this. It's nothing compared to those
of you that have been contributing to Cuis Smalltalk for years, but I think
it provides a good resource for anyone new to Smalltalk in general and Cuis
Smalltalk in particular.

I do not have a particular app in mind that I want to build with Smalltalk.
Instead I'm constantly thinking about how I would convince non-Smalltalk
developers to give Cuis Smalltalk a try. A perfect example of that is my
investigation into database access. Many of the developers I know are web
developers. Accessing relational databases is a fundamental part of
implementing most web applications. So I need to be able to demonstrate how
that is done from Cuis Smalltalk to have any hope of convincing my web
developer friends to try it. As far as I know, based on many searches,
there is not currently a web page that shows step-by-step how to access a
relational database using Cuis Smalltalk. I want to provide that if I can
learn how to do it.

While some in the community may have been annoyed by the number of
questions I have asked, I do hope there is a feeling that my presence in
the Cuis community has had a net positive impact. In addition to
the documentation I've created in my blog I have identified a number of
minor issues that have been fixed, contributed a small change set that
added the ability to set a background image in cover and tile modes, and
most recently contributed a library for implementing web servers that has
many advantages over the WebClient library (
https://github.com/mvolkmann/Cuis-Smalltalk-WebClientPlus).

I really want to contribute via the documentation I'm creating and hope
that at some point all of that content can be the basis for a book focused
on Cuis Smalltalk.

P.S. I honestly didn't know that the
Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev/Documentation/Technical directory existed. Thanks for
pointing that out. I'll read that now.

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 5:48 PM Juan Vuletich <juan at cuis.st> wrote:

> Hi Mark,
>
> What follows may be an intricate reading involving language, manners, and
> how the Open Source world works. Please read carefully.
>
> On 10/20/2024 7:31 AM, Mark Volkmann via Cuis-dev wrote:
>
> I should have asked “Is it possible that nobody that uses Cuis Smalltalk
> in macOS accesses relational databases?”
>
>
> Who knows? Cuis Smalltalk is MIT license you get the whole system, free
> for any use, without any obligations. That means that you are not required
> to disclose what you do with it. As a consequence of that, the answer to
> "it is possible that nobody that uses Cuis Smalltalk does XXX?" is true,
> for any XXX. Does this matter? I don't think so.
>
> A much better way to react would be something like "Hi Folks. I'm trying
> to do XXX. I know the system is fully open and explicitly designed to make
> it easy for me to solve my technical problems, but I'm still unable to do
> so. Has anybody faced these kinds of problems I'm seeing before, and is
> willing to help me?".
>
> That will indeed work much better.
>
> Additionally, some comment from you revealing that you have already read
> the contents of the /Documentation/Technical folder would be appreciated.
> Your first message made me believe you hadn't realized you had trouble
> calling an API via FFI. But Jon's answer doesn't tell you that, and assumes
> you already know that. Your following message makes me now believe that you
> know that the problem may be "how to reference a lib path in the Open
> Smalltalk VM", indeed being aware that this is a problem with FFI.
>
> Once you realize that, you may also realize that this problem has almost
> nothing to do with Cuis Smalltalk. A bit of googling shows people asking
> similar (but better formed) questions in nginx and lua.
>
> I'm starting to have doubts about your intellectual honesty while asking
> these questions. I think the Cuis community deserves better than this.
>

> Thanks,
>
>
> ---
> R. Mark Volkmann
> Object Computing, Inc.
>
> On Oct 20, 2024, at 6:26 AM, Mark Volkmann <r.mark.volkmann at gmail.com>
> <r.mark.volkmann at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  Yikes! Sounds complicated. Can you point me to any documentation that
> describes how I could reference a lib path in the Open Smalltalk VM?
>
> Is it possible that nobody that uses Cuis Smalltalk accesses relational
> databases?
>
> --
R. Mark Volkmann
Object Computing, Inc.
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