The Weekly Squeak

Category: Events

  • California Smalltalkers Meeting on Aug. 13: Craig Latta to Present His Work with Catalyst, a WASM-Based Smalltalk VM

    California Smalltalkers Meeting on Aug. 13: Craig Latta to Present His Work with Catalyst, a WASM-Based Smalltalk VM

    The California Smalltalkers meeting on August 13 at 7:00 p.m. PDT will feature a presentation by Craig Latta on his recent work with Catalyst, a WebAssembly GC (WASM GC) implementation of the Open Smalltalk virtual machine. Latta will share surprising results from experiments using AI models to dynamically translate Smalltalk methods into WASM functions.

    The talk will also examine the historical evolution of dynamic stack machine optimization and explore BNF-level optimizations enabled by the Epigram compilation framework.

    The meeting will additionally include community lightning talks, giving attendees an opportunity to highlight current projects and ideas. Participants are invited to draw inspiration from their peers, and those interested in giving a longer presentation in the future are encouraged to reach out to the organizers.

    To learn more or attend, visit the Meetup event page at:
    https://www.meetup.com/california-smalltalkers/events/308741033

    Have a great time with Smalltalk and keep on Squeaking!

  • ESUG 2025 International Conference

    ESUG 2025 International Conference

    The 30th ESUG conference/summer-school will be held in Gdansk, Poland from Tuesday 1st to Friday 4th of July 2025.

    Program & Info

    To be fleshed out.

    Calls for Contributions

    Conference registration

    Early registration deadline: 15/04/2025

    Conference prices ESUG 2025 in Euros:

    • Early Registration Fee: 600€ (all days) / 200€ (per day)
    • Late Registration Fee: 1000€ (all days) / 300€ (per day)
    • Extra person to social dinner: 70€
    • Payment by bank transfer: free of charge
    • Payment by credit card: +6% fees
    • For late registrations we cannot ensure the availability of T-Shirts nor Social Event extra participants
    • : If the refund is requested during the early bird period all the fee (without charges) will be refunded. If it is requested after the early bird period is finished, the refund will be 50%

    Stay tuned.

    Conference organization

    ESUG 2025 organization committee

    • Stéphane Ducasse, Inria Lille, France.
    • Pablo Tesone, Pharo Consortium, France.
    • Marcus Denker, Inria Lille, France.
    • Noury Bouraqadi, IMT, France.
    • Luc Fabresse, IMT Nord Europe, France.
    • Christophe Demarey, Inria Lille, France.
    • Steven Costiou, Inria Lille, France.
    • Oleksandr Zaitsev, CIRAD, France.
    • Mariusz Matuszek, Gdansk University, Poland
    • PaweÅ‚ Czarnul, Gdansk University, Poland

    IWST 2025 organization committee

    • Gordana Rakic, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
    • Guille Polito, Inria Lille, France
    • Steven Costiou, Inria Lille, France

  • Squeak meeting on November 2, 2024, in Potsdam

    Dear Squeakers, Smalltalkers, and friends of object-oriented, interactive programming environments!

    We cordially invite you again to our annual meeting of German-speaking Squeakers (Squeak Deutschland e.V). It will be filled with exciting lectures, demos, and discussions led by both us and you, while also serving as the general assembly of the association. If you want, you can end the meeting with us in the evening in a cozy atmosphere in a nearby inn.

    Should I register?

    Do you want to participate or do you have any questions or do you even have an idea for demo / lecture / discussion? Get in touch with us so we can plan better. We would like to remain flexible in terms of time and would plan about 15 to 45 minutes for orientation for each lecturer.

    For participation on site, please register by informal email to: marcel.taeumel@hpi.de

    When do we meet?

    Saturday, November 2, 2024, from 1 p.m.

    Where do we meet?

    We will hold the event in a hybrid form. After registration you can find us on site:

    Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering gGmbH
    Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3
    14482 Potsdam

    We are expected to be in the C-E communication zone at ABC (https://hpi.de/medien/anfahrtlageplan.html).

    Alternatively, we provide a virtual connection to the meeting point via Zoom ready. Check out the day of the event again: https://squeak.de/news/.

    How will it proceed?

    The exact process is still being finalized. You may also choose to spontaneously give a brief demo or share an experience report during the meeting. 🙂

    1. Lectures, demos, discussions (1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., subject to change)
      • How can an AI help you explore the objects?
      • How can visual elements make incomprehensible program text clearer?
      • How do you build your own programming language?
      • What new games are there for Squeak? 🙂
      • … And what are you doing with squeak? 🙂 …
    2. Association meeting (4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.)
      • Determination of the logger and the cash auditor
      • Determination of quorum
      • Presentation / change of agenda
      • Update member register
      • Activities of the association 2023-2024
      • Report of the treasurer and the cash auditor
      • Future activities
      • Other
    3. End in a nearby inn (from 6:30 p.m.)

    We hope to meet you again in Potsdam (or virtually).

    Stay healthy!

  • Doug Engelbart, American inventor and computing legend, Dies at 88.

    Sad news.  Most of the Smalltalk community knows all about Doug through stories shared by Alan.  Some of you have been lucky enough to have met him.  Much of what we know about computers was invented by some really terrific minds.  Today we lost one of the best.  It is amazing how far technology has progressed in such a short time.  We are lucky to live in a time that still has so many of the great inventors still alive.  It’s an amazing time to be standing the the shoulders of giants.  Alan Kay reminds us that all of the present is not made up of all of the past.  Only part of what was done back then survived and is in use today.  Some of our history is better than our present.  We should all take a moment and remember that past.

    I couldn’t help but notice that Doug has three controls.  The Mouse the keyboard and what?  A function menu?  A view selector? Just what is that left hand doing?  I know I’ve tried to explain ctrl-c to people and even today many people have no idea that keyboard shortcuts exist.  Just a thought.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/technology/douglas-c-engelbart-inventor-of-the-computer-mouse-dies-at-88.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&

    http://gigaom.com/2013/07/03/doug-engelbart-american-inventor-computing-legend-passes-away/

  • Squeakfest 2013 in Uruguay

    squeakfest2013

    It’s that time again.  Time to pack up the kids and join us at SqueakFest 2013.  Don’t forget to bring your XO computer!

    If you can’t make it please consider a donation to help cover travel costs: Donate

    For more information see: Squeakfest 2013

    From Rita:

    There will be a Squeakfest again in Uruguay at June, 7th – 9th, this time in Atlantida. Etoys will cover the major part of the event, but there will also be workshops in Python, turtle art and robotics. After all, Uruguay is the country with XO-laptops in every elementary school and teachers are using the software which comes with Sugar.

    http://squeakfest2013.weebly.com/

    From our education team, Randall Caton and myself are going to present Etoys workshops. This year, I’ll introduce Kedama. I’m looking forward to an inspiring event!

    If you want to help or know someone who would like to, I created a crowdfunding page to collect money to help to cover our travel cost. Please share as you like!

    http://crowdfundedu.com/fundraiser/educators-to-squeakfest

    Greetings,

    Rita

  • ESUG Awards for innovative software

    Noury Bouraqadi wants to  remind all Smalltalkers that the deadline for entries in the ESUG Innovation Technology Awards is in two weeks time. The Innovation Technology Awards, to be awarded at the 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference in Amsterdam, are intended to make public part of the innovative software built using Smalltalk. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, €500, €300 and €200 during an awards ceremony at the conference.

    The winners will be selected based on criteria of creativity, stability, performance, successful use, and impact for the community. No constraints are put on the software except that it should be Smalltalk-based or Smalltalk-related;  all flavours of Smalltalk are accepted.

     The awards were founded by Nouri in 2004, and details of past winners can be found on his web-site.

     

  • German Squeak Association Meeting: Demos

    The German Squeak Association (Squeak e. V.) had its annual meeting on May 17. For the second time, the meeting was hosted by the Software Architecture Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam. Before the official part, attendees of the meeting were given the opportunity to demonstrate their Squeak projects.

    First, Tobias Pape and Arian Treffer, students of HPI, demonstrated SwaLint, a source code checker for Squeak. SwaLint is intended as a successor to SmallLint and, thanks to its flexible plug-in architecture, supports running SmallLint checks seamlessly. SwaLint can be configured in great detail: thresholds for all kinds of values can be set, and output can be filtered. Users can easily implement their own plug-ins for the tool.

    Next, Michael Haupt (HPI) gave a brief demonstration of SqueakFS, which was implemented by Johan Björk and Eskil Andréen from Stockholm University, Sweden. SqueakFS makes the contents of a running Squeak image available as part of the file system. Currently, it is limited to read-only access, but the image can already be viewed from three perspectives: all classes as a flat collection, assorted by category, and by class hierarchy.

    Robert Krahn presented SqueakSVN, which is an ongoing development effort in the Software Architecture Group at HPI. The purpose of SqueakSVN is to make Subversion version control available to Squeak developers; it is able to import Monticello projects. SqueakSVN will be released in June.

    Martin Beck is currently working on his MSc thesis in the HPI Software Architecture Group. His work is dedicated to implementing NXTalk, a Smalltalk virtual machine for the Lego Mindstorms NXT platform. Development of NXTalk application takes place in a Squeak image, and assembled NXTalk images are transferred to the NXT for execution by the dedicated NXTalk VM. In the current state, simple images can be assembled and run: Martin demonstrated a program that can be used to steer a simple NXT bestowed with two motors.

    The popular introduction to the Seaside web application framework that was produced at HPI was briefly presented by David Tibbe, one of its co-authors.

    Robert Krahn had another appearance presenting the collection of games for the XO laptop developed by HPI students. All of the games are available for download as project or SAR files.

    Finally, Carl Friedrich Bolz (Düsseldorf University), Adrian Kuhn (University of Bern), and Toon Verwaest (University of Bern) presented SPy, their ongoing effort to implement the Squeak VM in Python using the sophisticated PyPy tool chain. SPy is currently lacking GUI  and other I/O support, but is able to load images and run the tinyBenchmarks. Right after the Squeak association meeting, a PyPy development sprint in Berlin will, amongst others, bring new improvements.

    After the official part of the association meeting, special guest Dan Ingalls gave a demonstration of Lively, his current project at Sun Labs. It looks and feels, admittedly, a bit like Squeak in disguise, but in Dan’s opinion, there is nothing bad about building the “same” system several times if it’s cool. That is certainly true for Lively.

  • The Year of Smalltalk

    The Year of Smalltalk

    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]

  • 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference *Call for Contributions*

    ESUGWelcome

    ———————————————————————
    16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference – Call for Contributions

    August 25-29, 2008 – Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008/
    ———————————————————————-

    For the past 16 years, the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) has organised the International Smalltalk Conference, a lively forum on cutting edge software technologies that attract people from both academia and industry for a whole week. The attendees are both engineers using Smalltalk in business and students and teachers using Smalltalk both for research and didactic purposes.

    As every year, this year’s edition of the largest European Smalltalk event will include the regular Smalltalk developers conference with renowned invited speakers, a Smalltalk camp that proves fruitful for interactions and discussions. Besides, this year will be held the 4th edition of the Innovation Technology Awards where prizes will be awarded to authors of best pieces of Smalltalk-related projects.

    You can support the ESUG conference in many different ways:

    * Sponsor the conference. New sponsoring packages are described at http://www.esug.org/supportesug/becomeasponsor/
    * Submit a talk, a software or a paper to one of the events. See below.
    * Attend the conference. We’d like to beat the previous record of attendance (116 people at Köthen, Germany in 2004)!
    * Students can get free registration and hosting if they enroll into the the Student Volunteers program. See below.

    The conference features the following events:

    * Camp Smalltalk – There will be a Smalltalk camp the 23-24th of august
    * Developers Forum
    * Technology Forum

    Developers Forum : International Smalltalk Developers Conference
    ——————
    This year we are looking for YOUR experience on using Smalltalk. The list of topics includes, but is not limited to the following:

    * XP practices
    * Development tools
    * Experience reports
    * Model driven development
    * Web development
    * Team management
    * Meta-Modeling
    * Security
    * New libraries & frameworks
    * Educational material
    * Embedded systems and robotics
    * SOA and Web services
    * Interaction with other programming languages

    Submissions due on 1st June 2008
    Notification of acceptance on 15 of June 2008 More information at http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008

    How to sumbit?
    ——————
    Pay attention: the places are limited so do not wait till the last minute to apply. Prospective presenters should submit a request to esug-info@esug.org
    following the template below. Please use this template since the email will be automatically processed!

    Subject: [ESUG 2008 Developers] + your name

    First Name:

    Last Name:

    Email where you can always be reached:

    Title:

    Abstract:

    Bio:

    Any presentation not respecting this form will be discarded automatically

    Technology Forum
    ——————
    We are proud to announce the 4th Innovation Technology Awards. The top
    3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros during an awards ceremony at the conference. Developers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete.
    More information at http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008

    Student Volunteer Program
    ——————
    If you are a student wanting to attend ESUG, have you considered being a student volunteer? Student volunteers help keep the conference running smoothly; in return, they have free accommodations, while still having most of the time to enjoy the conference.
    More information at
    http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008

    Esug Student Volunteers Program

    We hope to see you there and have fun together.

  • XO in the US Virgin Islands

    Waveplace XO Day

    Great video of the Waveplace XO Laptop Day.