The Weekly Squeak

Squeak by Example has been a hugely successful introduction to Squeak since its publication last year, and it has now been made available to a wider audience, following the publication of a French edition Squeak par l’exemple. As with the English edition, the book has been made available in print from print-on-demand specialists lulu.com for around €17/$20/£11, or can be downloaded from the site as a pdf.

Squeak par l’exemple was produced thanks to the hard work of the team of translators: Martial Boniou, Mathieu Chappuis, Luc Fabresse, René Mages, Nicolas Petton, Alain Plantec, Benoît Tuduri and Serge Stinckwich.

The Software Architecture Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (who have produced a great online Seaside tutorial and associated book) have recently been involved in using Etoys in the classroom. They kindly sent us this report about the experience of two of their members when introducing Squeak and Etoys to high school students.

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From Aaron E. Walsh:

Happy New Year, everyone. As we enter 2008 I’m happy to announce that the Boston Digital Media Summit (next weekend) is focused on Immersive Education and will feature Croquet in several sessions (see the schedule of events below; Julian’s keynote is on Day 1 — January 12th).

Please join us if you’re in the Boston area or would like to make a trip for the event. The news release is below, and I’ve attached the PDF version as well.
It’s also in HTML format along with related news items at:

http://ImmersiveEducation.org/#NEWS

The Summit schedule of events has been set, which you can also see at:

http://mediagrid.org/summit/ (main page)
http://mediagrid.org/summit/program.html (schedule of events)

Best regards,
Aaron

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WordPress.com (the free service that hosts The Weekly Squeak) has recently done some adjustments to its blogs’ RSS feeds. This adjustment led to the discovery of a bug in the Universal Feed Parser used by some desktop and web aggregators (such as Planet Squeak). The bug has been promptly fixed, but if you’re still experiencing problems we suggest switching to the Weekly Squeak’s Atom feeds (Entries feed, Comments feed) until your service is upgraded to the newest version of the feed parser.

Alexandre Bergel has just announced on the Squeak Dev mailing list his work on Athena, a new Smalltalk environment intended to be embedded in Java programs. Athena comprises a set of tools to use the Smalltalk programming language in an embedded setting. It offers a small (100kB) virtual machine written in Java, a shell, and a set of tools to program Athena from Squeak.

The Athena VM is based on work done by Timothy A. Budd on Smallworld, and is released under the MIT licence.

You can see a video of Alexandre’s talk about Athena at the Squeak BOF at OOPSLA 2007.

Some Microsoft EX-exec’s sue Red Hat for patent infringement. How “EX” you say? Well the last one arrived Oct 1st. The patent is for a windowed GUI. Hummm that’s a good one. Wait didn’t Dan do that?

Smalltalk to the rescue?? Help is on the way!

The News Team is proud to announce that, as of today, the Weekly Squeak news blog has a new home at http://news.squeak.org.

The blog will still be hosted by WordPress.com, but its main address will be the squeak.org one. The old address, http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com, will still work and will redirect the viewes and the RSS feed subscribers to the new address.

Thot, a French-Canadian magazine on distance learning, has published a small article on Squeak and the Etoys, including the EToys-derivate V-Toys.

The article, written in French, may be found here. Thot also provides a machine-translated English version of it, that may be found here.

Steps Toward The Reinvention of Programming
A Compact And Practical Model of Personal Computing As A Self-Exploratorium
By Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Yoshiki Ohshima, Ian Piumarta, Andreas Raab

From: James Robertsons Blog Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

January 15, 2007 00:43:30 EST

We did an interview with David Griswold, one of the original developers of Strongtalk on this week’s show. With me were Michael Lucas-Smith, David Buck, and Bryce Kampjes - along with our guest, David Griswold. I pretty much got out of the way and let the other guys talk about Strongtalk and Smalltalk VM technology. It was a good conversation, with lots of good stuff on VM technology.

You can find the interview here: Industry Misinterpretations 18: Strongtalk with David Griswold