Back to the Future: Programming in Smalltalk
17 June, 2009
More exciting conference news for Smalltalk aficionados: James Foster has announced on his blog that this year’s OOPSLA conference will include several tutorials with a Smalltalk theme including his “Back to the Future: Programming in Smalltalk” in which he will look at the “new” ideas from Smalltalk that are still influencing newer programming languages. He will examine some of these ideas and present a number of tutorial exercises that explore some of Smalltalk’s fundamentally different approach to language design and object orientation, including the following aspects:
- All values are objects, even integers, booleans, and characters (no boxing/unboxing);
- Classes and methods are objects (supporting reflection);
- The language has only five reserved words;
- All control flow (looping and conditional branching) is done through message sends;
- Programming is done by sending messages to existing objects; and
- The base class library can be modified.
James works on Gemstone’s high performance product family based on Smalltalk, but intends the exercises to be relevant across different versions.
This year’s OOPSLA will be held in Orlando, Florida from 25 to 29 October, and will also be co-located with the Dynamic Languages Symposium, which will doubtless have lots to interest Smalltalkers.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a European break this year, don’t forget that the 2009 International Smalltalk Conference, organised by ESUG, will be held in Brest, France, from 31 August to 4 September, and also has a great set of sessions lined up.
Squeak and Seaside BOFs at OOPSLA ’08
25 October, 2008
Nicolas Chen has posted a very interesting report on the Squeak and Seaside ‘Birds of a Feather’ sessions at this year’s OOPSLA Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Speakers included Michael Lucas-Smith of Cincom talking about their WebVelocity development tool for Seaside; Göran Krampe on Blackfoot, his lightweight SCGI-based KomHttpServer replacement for Seaside deployment; Dave Ungar (ex-Sun Labs, now at IBM Research) on his work on multi-core Squeak; and Jecel Assumpcao Jr. on Smalltalk Hardware Design, and his Siliconsqueak project.
As promised, Göran has published videos of the sessions; see his blog for details.
Squeak BOF at OOPSLA 2008
7 October, 2008
OOPSLA, the “original conference devoted to object-oriented programming”, is running this year on 19th-23rd October in Nashville. Göran Krampe wrote to the mailing list to let attendees know that he is organising a Squeak “Birds of a Feather” evening session on Tuesday at 18:00.
Göran has had experience of organising these events in the past, so you can be sure that the logistics have been thought through carefully – he’s even bringing his own projector with him from Sweden, rather than rely on the equipment available at the venue! All the videos of all the presentations will be made available after the session.
If you’re interested in attending this session, please let Göran know by adding your name to the OOPSLA 2008 page on the Squeak wiki (if you’re having trouble editing that page, the words squeak and viewpoints may be of some use to you). The wiki page also has information on some other items that may be of interest to Squeakers.
The Weekly Squeak 