Smalltalks 2009 videos and photos available
12 December, 2009
Hernan Wilkinson wrote to the squeak -dev mailing list that the Smalltalks 2009 presentations are available now at the Smalltalks Conference site under the “Talks” tab. Given that the speakers included such well-known figures as Dan Ingalls, Stephane Ducasse, Alex Warth, Tim Mackinnon, James Foster and Travis Griggs, there should be some fascinating viewing to be had.
Hernan added: “You can watch also the video used during the presentation that summarizes the previous two years of the conference, it is a very nice video. It is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekRhvg7W6AQ“.
There are also links to other videos and pictures from the conference home page.
Return To Smalltalk
7 November, 2009
The NYC Smalltalk group manages an active programme of talks and presentations, and this month’s talk looks to be very interesting. Daniel Antion, Vice President of Information Services at American Nuclear Insurers, discusses why his company began planning to migrate away from Smalltalk, and the evolving circumstances that caused them to take the difficult decision to reverse this strategy.
Dan has been working in Smalltalk since 1994 and develops most of ANI’s transaction processing systems. Dan has presented at Smalltalk Solutions, OOPSLA and the AIIM Expo on topics related to systems development, content management and SharePoint.
Dan’s experience and position within ANI mean that he can offer some real insights into the perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of Smalltalk from a corporate perspective, and the ongoing challenges it faces. He says “I’m not sure we saved Smalltalk forever but we bought it some serious time. The technical details that work for Smalltalk include its stability, malleability and extensibility. We still have concerns but we think they can be mitigated.”
If you’re going to be in New York on 18th November, find out more about Dan’s talk on the NYC Smalltalk website.
(Image by meironke on flickr)
On 15/16 May, the workshop on Self-Sustaining Systems (S3) took place at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam. An exciting event at a beautiful place, it featured invited talks by Ian Piumarta, Dan Ingalls, and Richard P. Gabriel, and five presentations of reviewed papers that approached self-sustainment from different angles.
Video of Newspeak lecture now available
19 April, 2008
The video has now been posted of Gilad Bracha‘s talk on Newspeak that we mentioned last month. Newspeak is a new dynamic language being developed at Cadence, and is descended from Smalltalk and Self, with influences from E, Scala and Scheme, exploring ideas around combinatorial parsing, strict message-passing, reflectivity, capability-based security and actor-style concurrency.
Newspeak is being developed on top of Squeak, and the presentation makes a number of direct comparisons with Squeak, especially when discussing UI matters such as the Newspeak widget framework, application framework and Class Browser, and how they’ve improved on Squeak’s access to the operating system with a new FFI framework.
The roadmap for the future development of Newspeak is also laid out, including a discussion of when/whether the code will be published.
(If you’re having trouble viewing the video, see this thread for help).
[Edit - Gilad Bracha has a fascinating blog that records his ongoing development of Newspeak.]
The Year of Smalltalk
2 April, 2008
Randal L. Schwartz just announced that he will be giving a 3 hour tour of Seaside at OSCON 2008. We are very proud to have Randal on the Squeak Foundation Board. We are looking forward to more of his “Year of Smalltalk“.
[Edit: corrected spelling]
Talk on “Newspeak” today
11 March, 2008
Jens Lincke informed the mailing list that the are hosting a talk today (11th March) by Gilad Bracha on Newspeak, described as a new dynamic language, descended from Smalltalk and Self.
From Jens’ note:
Newspeak is a new dynamic language, descended from Smalltalk
and Self. Like Self, Newspeak is a message based language: all
computation – even an object’s own access to its internal structure – is
performed by sending messages to objects. However, like Smalltalk,
Newspeak is class-based. Classes can be nested arbitrarily, as in Beta.
Since all names denote message sends, all classes are virtual; in
particular, superclasses are virtual, so all classes act as mixins.
There is no static state in Newspeak. Instead, top level classes act as
module definitions, which are independent, immutable, self-contained
parametric namespaces. They can be instantiated into modules which may
be stateful and mutually recursive. Naturally, like its predecessors,
Newspeak is reflective: a mirror library allows structured access to the
program meta-level. In this talk, we’ll expand on these topics,
illustrating interesting uses such as class hierarchy inheritance and
domain specific language support.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.
The talk is from 16:00-17:00, at the Hasso Plattner Institut, B-E.2 (library). Directions can be found at: http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hpi/campus/anfahrt.html
