The Weekly Squeak

Four New Core Developers

smalltalktelevision — Mon, 28 May 2012 11:22:47 +0000

The Squeak evolution as a body of code allows anybody to submit a change to the Inbox. Only those who are core developers can move that code into the Trunk to become part of the next release. Owing to their outstanding contributions, the Squeak Oversight Board has invited four people to become core developers: Frank Shearar, Tim Felgentreff, Sean DeNigris, and Tobias Pape. Congratulations!

Hardware Hacking With Squeak

smalltalktelevision — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:59:28 +0000

The BeagleBone is a single-board computer from Texas Instruments for creating hardware projects similar to Arduino. David Graham has installed Squeak on the BeagleBone and then connected to the running image with VNC. This is likely the easiest way to begin to make a working robot with Squeak. This project is similar to Physical Etoys, the ESUG Innovation Awards winner of 2010. Optimus Prime, beware!

Etoys 5 Released

smalltalktelevision — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:33:47 +0000

The latest versionof the software found around the world in the One Laptop Per Child computer — Etoys — is now available from the Squeakland website. In Etoys 5 you’ll find new features such as single-stepping a script, attached watchers, a graph paper tool, and ScratchConnect, a way to connect Etoys and Scratch.

Squeakfest Coming Up

smalltalktelevision — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:06:41 +0000

Squeakfest 2012 in Uruguay and Argentina is coming up soon: 17 to 23 May in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in introductory workshops, develop content for various curricular areas, learn about project development, educational robotics and other topics related to Squeak Etoys and the One Laptop Per Child project.

Zero Percent Failure

smalltalktelevision — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:55:10 +0000

How many calls have you missed since 2009? For Childline, a child-crisis-hotline service in South Africa, that number has been zero. Squeak Oversight Board member Chris Muller developed a GIS module to provide real-time regional call routing for 4Dst’s “Awareness Engine” product. Explore the presentation he made at this year’s Smalltalk Industry Council convention. Squeak Smalltalk — good in a crisis.

Physical Etoys 2.0 released

smalltalktelevision — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:42:37 +0000

Physical Etoys 2.0 has been released with lots of new features:

1. First of all, it’s based on Etoys 5.0 so it incorporates all the
bug-fixes and new features from the Etoys release.
2. It focuses on the two main hardware platforms: Arduino and
Lego Mindstorms Nxt.
3. An Argentinian version of Arduino is now supported called DuinoBot.

More information available at http://tecnodacta.com.ar/gira/projects/physical-etoys/.

New Squeak Oversight Board elected

smalltalktelevision — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:12:28 +0000

The leadership team for 20 April 2012 to – 20 April 2013 (approximately) has been announced after the regular voting period. The order reflects the ranking from the election using default Condorcet completion rules (Beatpath/Schulze/CSSD). As usual, the rules actually give the same top 7 choices in the same order. The is year’s Squeak Oversight Board is composed of:

1. Bert Freudenberg
2. Craig Latta
3. Colin Putney
4. Chris Muller
5. Randal Schwartz
6. Levente Uzonyi
7. Chris Cunnington

Cuis 4.0 Released

smalltalktelevision — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 01:53:11 +0000

Cuis 4.0 has been released. This is a big release for Cuis, as it has been ten months since the last version. Lots of new features are available including a StyledTextEditor by Bernhard Pieber. All the details are available at the Cuis website at http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/CuisReleaseNotes.html.

Is Javascript the SmallTalk 2012?

daitangio — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 23:01:34 +0000

There is a lot of hype surrounding JavaScript.

Years ago Google started the developing of V8, a super Just in time compiler for its Chrome Browser.

The V8 compiler revamped competition: Microsoft and Mozilla foundation strike back optimizing their JavaScript interpreters.

On these days, a strong community is growing using Node.js, a web server “Evented I/O [Web application server] for V8 JavaScript“. Node.js sposts a non-blocking architecture which can lead to very fast server, able to process a lot of request with a single thread.

A quick peek on the people now. Lars Bak is the leader of the V8 project. It has worked on the design of Self and on the HotSpot JIT. Lars Bak also co authored “Mixin in StrongTalk”.

So a lot of the optimization which let Smalltalk and Java shine, are used in the JavaScript field nowadays. It is a simple “accident” ?…or it is destiny?

JavaScript rocks? There is plenty of documentation all around, even if the first ECMA specification was quite unreadable in my humble opinion There are some optimal guidelines for JavaScript module writing, for instance see the manuals on JQuery plugin development. But in JavaScript you are still a free player if you wish: no rule, no even need of structuring your code in some way:

var sith={}

sith.name=”DarthVader”;

sith.name=function(){
return “Nevermind, I am a function, now”;
}

The code above builds a very generic object, and add to it properties (which could be a function).

Worst, you get very strange things, evaluting:

[1,2]+[3,4]

you got:

“1,23,4″

This because “+” is not supported for arrays, so the JavaScript language is effectively doing…

([1,2]+”")+[3,4]

I like dynamic languages like Self, but this is somewhat too…flexible

And last but not least JavaScript lacks a true integrated developement environment, even if here we smalltalkers could help a bit

So, SmallTalk2012 is not this version of JavaScript, at least not yet; JavaScript Harmony specification is working hard trying to polishing the language…As usual, the better way to predict the future is to …invent it… So let’s give Harmony a chance!

Hard at work at Camp Smalltalk

Michael Davies — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 11:32:04 +0000

Camp Smalltalk is well under way in the bright and modern School of Informatics building at the University of Edinburgh.

Stéphane Ducasse got proceedings off to a flying start yesterday with an intensive introduction to Smalltalk for newcomers. Today, work continues on a number of projects including SUnit, Seaside, Pier, Gofer, SLAPS (an LDAP server implementation) and Spoon.

And, of course, everyone is taking the opportunity to begin catching up with old friends, making new ones, and preparing their presentations for next week’s ESUG Conference.