Randal Schwartz is very keen that there should be one community-supported site for collating and finding Smalltalk-related job postings. He says:

It’s been very helpful to the Perl community to get one place for all serious Perl jobs: jobs.perl.org. Because then all the smart people look there, and all the clueful employers post there, and it’s also free. And the stats at http://jobs.perl.org/about/stats show that Perl is far from dead.

I’m trying to do the same thing for Smalltalk. Please support me in that. Don’t point at other places.  Get them to post at http://smalltalkjobs.dabbledb.com.  It will be good for all of us overall. Truly.

The DabbleDB interface has many RSS feeds for particular areas, and can be pulled out and searched in detail.  It’s also all in Smalltalk, which is a good demo.

Ken Causey has already set up jobs.squeak.org to redirect to http://smalltalkjobs.dabbledb.com, so it look like Randal’s hopes will be fulfilled.

Smalltalk positions around the world! Interested in a Smalltalk Job? Ready to see the world? Check out Noury Bouraqadi’s Smalltalk Jobs and Internship page.

Dr. Bouraqadi just posted 3 new Jobs in Paris France, for French Speakers.

We reported earlier that Qwaq received funding, well today Qwaq announced that it is hiring. They are looking for a Software Quality Engineer and a Senior Unix System Administrator. Qwaq builds secure 3d virtual worlds for business collaboration that is written in Squeak and Croquet. It is very exciting to watch this company grow. We will be watching.

As we previously mentioned Vassili Bykov recently left VisualWorks to join Eliot Miranda and Gilad Bracha at Cadence. Vassili was “the tools guy” at VisualWorks and contributed a huge amount to the current Smalltalk platform, from core frameworks such as Announcements to new or updated tools such as Trippy, a much enhanced inspector, and Parcel Browser–a wonderful tool for finding and browsing contributed packages. He also did much work on improving the appearance of the VisualWorks UI.

Previously Vassili worked for The Object People as an instructor and as a TOPLink developer. TOPLink is an object/RDBMS mapping software that significantly simplifies object persistence. It is similar to Glorp which is an Open Source project written by some of the same people.

I spoke with Vassili about Smalltalk.

Ron: Vassili I love your comment, “OO programmers fall into two categories: Smalltalkers and those who don’t get it.” It’s easy for me being on the inside looking out. Can you share with us your feelings about the benefits of Smalltalk and OO Programming in general?

Vassili: I’m sure my feelings are very similar to those of most others “on the inside”, so to make it more interesting here is a less common angle. User interfaces are not only the things we see on the screen. A programming language is also a user interface. It presents us with an imaginary world of entities, and the ability to act in that world, that we use to build solutions to our problems.

In About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design, Alan Cooper talks about UI “excise”. Excise are those actions required by the UI that have nothing to do with achieving the user’s goal and only support the UI itself. For example, rearranging, resizing and closing windows in a UI that opens a new one for nearly everything you do. In an OO language, messages are the useful actions, and most things that aren’t about what one object tells another object is excise. Smalltalk has virtually no excise, which makes it a clean and efficient UI.

As for the benefits of OO in general, I think they lie in the fact that programming is all about building and maintaining a model of the problem and its solution. Objects are a very good construction material, pliable enough that the model is easy to build and change as our understanding of the requirements changes. Which brings us back to the benefits of Smalltalk–as experience shows, objects in languages with higher excise are not quite as pliable.

Ron: The death of Smalltalk has been predicted many times. Some would argue that Smalltalk is already dead. What do you think is missing from Smalltalk, if anything, which is limiting its broader appreciation, or do you believe like some that Smalltalk is the professional developers best kept secret?

Vassili: A rich corporation pouring hundreds of millions into marketing and open-source development would be a very welcome addition indeed. Failing that, it’s the same thing as for everything else at the software bazaar: Smalltalk needs to offer something of value to get attention. We on the inside know how great and liberating the language is, but it takes time and effort to get to the point where one can appreciate that.

On the other hand, there are quite a few roadblocks. One has to accept things such as the weakness–or the outright ugliness–on the UI side, or the lack of a simple deployment story, or the relative isolation from the underlying OS facilities. This is essentially a credibility issue, since for many developers it is unthinkable that a serious tool would not provide these. (What I just said is not entirely true of Dolphin, Ambrai, S# and a few others, but I am speaking of the implementations that are closer to me. After all, it’s Squeak that is the lead Smalltalk representative in the Open Source universe).

In the case of Squeak nothing can fix these but the community. Which makes growing the community and advancing such projects–not blue-plane stuff, just things that matter for the developers–very important.

In fact, I want to say a few words in defense of the pink plane. Yes, Smalltalk is this great thing that is much more than just a programming language. It’s an almost organic malleable “stem cell” that can grow into virtually anything. Alan Kay is famously disappointed by people not recognizing this. Matz of Ruby fame quotes him say that Smalltalk is a dead language he doesn’t like anymore, that Smalltalk-76 was closer to his ideas than Smalltalk-80 which was strongly influenced by Lisp. No matter how true that is, I think such a viewpoint lacks appreciation of how important it is to popularize Smalltalk philosophy by making it attractive to “the masses” and by growing the community of active users. It is thanks to the success of Smalltalk-80 and its descendents that many Smalltalkers, myself included, had discovered the better way.

A professional photographer may shoot a hundred photos and select one to keep. There should be no shame about a hundred people writing boring mundane stuff in Smalltalk as if it were plain old Java. If that makes Smalltalk visible enough to attract one person with a spark who will get a bright idea and for once use Smalltalk “right”, those hundred mundane apps will also have made their blue plane contribution.

Smalltalk is indeed more than a language. It is a cultural phenomenon, and it needs a community for that culture to live on. If the community disappears, that’s when Smalltalk will truly die. But as there doesn’t seem to be anything quite like Smalltalk around, I don’t think there is any danger of it happening anytime soon.

Ron: You have been working on the commercial Smalltalk product. Now that the chains have been lifted and you get to work with Squeak, will you be contributing your skills to building some of those tools you are known for?

Vassili: I hope it’s OK for me to reveal that Squeak development tools are not the market Cadence has plans for, so building tools in Squeak will not be my first priority. On the other hand, I haven’t seriously looked at Squeak for many years, and now I very much enjoy studying what has changed and what is new. I don’t think I’ll be able to resist the old habits. Though I also must say that while the chains have been lifted, attached to them was a not yet perfect but overall quite nice and usable widget library…

Ron: I know that Gilad said he can’t talk about it, but nobody reads these articles, what are you guys up to over at Cadence?

Vassili: Cadence stock is up 15% after your interview with Gilad. It looks like someone is reading. But seriously, I think Gilad did say quite a lot about the important things. I mean, who of the readers really cares what business stuff Cadence is up to? As for what we do, clearly it involves a dynamic OO approach, at the moment it involves Squeak, and it’s a clean slate project that allows us to take a fresh look at many things. This is cool–what else could possibly matter?

Ron: I know the guys over at VW and the entire community will miss you. Did you want to take this opportunity to say goodbye, or did you have any final thoughts or suggestions for your successors?

Vassili: I will miss them too. Cincom Smalltalk team includes some of the nicest and brightest people I’ve worked with. My biggest regret is that I didn’t get a chance to work long enough with Travis Griggs whom we hired in September to work with me on tools–but I very much enjoyed even that short time. I am sure Tools are in good hands now.

In fact, I hope to not have to say goodbye at all. I am a Smalltalker and a member of the same community, and I am staying in touch with many of my former teammates. We might not be looking at the same bugs together anymore, but the friendship remains, and that’s what counts.

Vassili Bykov is a Senior Member of Consulting Staff at Cadence Design Systems. Previously, he was a Tools Technical Lead working on VisualWorks at Cincom Systems, and an instructor and engineer at The Object People prior to that. Vassili’s interests lie in user interface design, taken in a broader than usual sense and including programming language semantics and APIs. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a Certified Usability Analyst (CUA) certification from Human Factors International, Inc.

Ron Teitelbaum is a long time Smalltalk Programmer. He is President/Principal Software Engineer at US Medical Record Specialists

Gilad Bracha is a legend in Object Oriented Programming. He is the Co-Author of the Java Language Specification and one of the major contributors to Strongtalk which has just been released by Sun under an Open Source License.

Gilad is forming a team at Cadence and is raising eye brows with his latest hires. Eliot Miranda and Vassili Bykov recently left Cincom to join Gilad at Cadence . Eliot is well-known known as a Master of Smalltalk Development. Vassili Bykov was the lead tool builder of VisualWorks. We can’t help wondering about the team of Gilad, Eliot, and Vassili. I spoke with Gilad about Cadence, Smalltalk, and Open Source.

Ron: Gilad, thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions. I’m sure the question on everyone’s mind is what is Cadence up too? Can you share anything about what you are working on? Are you developing in Java, Smalltalk, Strongtalk or creating something new?

Gilad: Cadence develops tools for EDA – Electronic Design Automation. This is the stuff engineers use to design chips, boards etc. Almost every company developing electronics has some Cadence tools. I can’t say much about our project, except that it is very cool. The project brings together several issues that really interest me. There is a very strong element of language design. Domain specific languages are widely used in EDA. There’s an element of formal methods – EDA is probably the only area where formal methods are really used commercially in a big way. Finally, there are a lot of OO infrastructure issues. Altogether, I’m having a blast.

We’re using Squeak as our development environment at the moment. However, we are not bound to any particular environment or engine. If Strongtalk evolves to the point where it is stable enough, we might use it. Or we might use something else. We’re keeping our options open.

Ron: Can you share with us your feelings about Open Source development in general? I’m interested in your opinion of the future of Open Source, business adoption of Open Source Software and Business Models for Software Development Companies engaging in Open Source projects.

Gilad: Open source is a complex topic and I can’t begin to do it justice here. I favor open source licenses that allow for commercial use, as opposed to the fanatics who want to force everything to be free. I think open source and commercial software should, and necessarily will, continue to coexist.

The quality of a lot of open source work is a big concern. Squeak is a case in point. There are 5 ways to do everything, but none that are truly finished and polished. Documentation is negligible. So I get frustrated with it. However, I’m really glad it exists.

To solve these issues, we need a model where people do pay for software – not for the artifact, but for the service. Subscriptions, where you pay regularly and get bug fixes and new features as long as you pay. This could be coupled with backup, storage, network access etc. I think this will be a while coming, but software as a service is the future.

Ron: Smalltalk has a long history as you know very well. There are a lot of very talented people working with Smalltalk, as well as a number of companies that use Smalltalk. We have a number of very interesting projects written in Smalltalk like: Seaside, Croquet, Sophie, Scratch, and OLPC. Given your vast perspective can you give us your opinion of the future of Smalltalk? What changes, if any, are needed to help ensure its future?

Gilad: I think the Smalltalk community needs to be more focused on issues like security, modularity, deployment and integration with the outside world. The language itself may need to change to support that.

There needs to be a focus on providing valuable solutions. One needs to able to show people how to solve daily programming tasks that they care about. Frankly, there needs to be less focus on educating children. I mean, what does our society pay a teacher? You can see that it doesn’t value educating preschoolers – we just pay lip service to it. It’s a noble goal, but in the end if your language dies, you can’t educate anybody.

I think Avi Bryant’s work is exemplary of what should be done: things like Seaside and DabbleDB. We need lots more of that. Another example of a good way to move forward is Fscript. It needs to be easy to open a native window, or run a script that calls the OS, or drive a web application. Look how much traction Ruby has. There needs to be real source code – the file out format is a disgrace.

Ron: The release of Strongtalk is very exciting for many in the Smalltalk community. Will you be working with or supporting the Open Source development of Strongtalk?

Gilad: Does moral support count? I really hope Strongtalk takes off, but it will certainly take time. When it stabilizes, we may very well use it. An open source community is germinating around Strongtalk. David Griswold is coordinating the effort. I’m happy to answer questions about the type checker, the mirror system etc. But the urgent thing is to stabilize the VM. Alas, it’s hard to get people with the right expertise to work on that for free. There are people who want to learn about advanced VMs and are willing to take the time and effort to do so. So there will be a learning curve, and it will take longer than we’d like. However, ultimately the technology is too good to pass up.

Ron: Are you still forming a team at Cadence? How many more people are you looking to hire? Are you focused mostly on VM and internal language issues, or will you be taking on application development for Cadence? How is the team shaping up, are Eliot and Vassili happy?

Gilad: Yes, we are still looking for people – Smalltalkers or otherwise. At this stage, the project is mainly seeking application programmers. A familiarity with EDA, Modeling, Formal methods is a plus – but the main things we look for are really solid OO design skills, cleverness and above all, good taste. I may also have openings for language types if the right person comes along. We have a great team and I intend to keep it that way, so we are being extremely selective. Eliot and Vassili are terrific, and I think they have every reason to be happy. I know I am.

Gilad Bracha is a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence Design Systems. Previously, he was a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.

Ron Teitelbaum is a long time Smalltalk Programmer and is Currently President / Principal Software Engineer at US Medical Record Specialists

This is a job post from Squeak-Dev

I’m looking for a software developer for a full time job in Groot-Bijgaarden (Vlaams-Brabant, Belgium). You need to live in Belgium if you want to apply for this job.

Prior experience in Smalltalk isn’t necessary but it is a plus. A training of Smalltalk, XP programming and an introduction to the television world will be given by the company when you start.

You can read the full job description at http://www.ictvacatures.be/job/show/105

(Note: job description is in Dutch)

Kind regards,

Nick Snels
http://www.ictvacatures.be http://www.ictvacatures.be
IT and telecommunication jobs

Avi Bryant has asked for help with Image Segments. He is offering to compensate anyone that can help to move some image segments to a file instead of increasing the size of the image itself. Please contact Avi if you would like to help with this latest community bounty project.

Cadence Design Systems, the leader in Electronic Design Automation, is seeking outstanding software engineers for a novel technology project at its San Jose, California campus.

We are seeking developers with the following qualifications: Object Oriented design and modeling Advanced degree in Computer Science Working experience with Smalltalk/Squeak desirable Exposure to formal methods Exposure to system design languages (UML, Mathlab/Simulink, System- C, Esterel), and system design flows an advantage Ability to work in a fast paced industrial environment Current US work permit.

Interested parties should contact Gilad Bracha (Gilad@Cadence.com).