Smalltalks 2010 – conference report
18 November, 2010
Smalltalks 2010 took place last weekend, meaning that the post-conference reports have started hitting the blogs, and they’re universally enthusiastic about the content, organisation and atmosphere of the event.
Organised by Fundacion Argentina de Smalltalk (FAST), and hosted this year by Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, in Concepción del Uruguay, Smalltalks aims to “strengthen the Argentine and international Smalltalk communities through the exchange of works, experiences and anecdotes connected with this technology or related matters”. This year’s speakers included Gilad Bracha, Eliot Miranda, Lukas Renggli and many many more (see the conference home page for a full listing and descriptions of talks).
German Arduino described it as an “excellent event, with very very good organization—thanks to the hard work of FAST people—and high level technical talks”.
Felipao Banados was attending his first Smalltalk conference, and was also impressed: “I remember talking with classmates and hearing things like ‘Yeah, Smalltalk, nice. But where can you work on that afterwards?’ Well, there ARE a lot of interesting places to do it, and there is a need for smalltalk programmers.”
Andrés Valloud posted some rocking photos of the social event, and reported that the conference even got coverage in the local paper, including a video interview with Hernán Wilkinson.
As James Robertson wrote: “Sounds a lot like ESUG to me – and that’s a good thing.”
Smalltalk: the past, the present, and the future?
15 July, 2010
Anyone with an interest in the continuing role and development of Smalltalk has had lots to chew on over the past few days.
As part of a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages, Computerworld Australia has published a conversation with Alan Kay about his role in the development of the “foundation of much of modern programming today: Smalltalk-80”, Object-Oriented Programming, and modern software development.
InfoQ is running a series of interviews recorded at QCon London. One of these is a session with Ralph Johnson and Joe Armstrong discussing the Future of OOP, including their take on what Smalltalk got wrong and right.
Finally, Gilad Bracha continues to lay out his vision for what he sees as Smalltalk’s successor, Newspeak. His latest post contains encouragement and advice for those interested in porting existing libraries and applications to Newspeak.
Avi Bryant Interview
28 July, 2008
Werner Schuster from InfoQ.com spent some time talking to Avi Bryant at QCon London 2008, and InfoQ have posted a recording of their conversation. In the interview, Avi talks about the Smalltalk web framework Seaside, DabbleDB, using Smalltalk images for persistence instead of an RDBMs, GemStone and more.
Randal Schwartz Talks With Leo about Squeak, EToys and OLPC
20 February, 2008
Don’t miss this fun new video from Randal Schwartz and Leo about Squeak, EToys and OLPC. Randal builds a very nice car demo.
Don’t Miss Cincom’s Seaside Podcasts Next Week
30 September, 2007
From Michael Lucas-Smith:
Hi Everyone,
Just a heads up that Industry Misinterpretations, our Smalltalk podcast, has three podcasts specifically about Seaside coming out over the next week.
Podcast #1: Myself, James Robertson, Tamara Kogan, Martin Kobetic, Arden Thomas
Podcast #2: Myself, James Robertson, Michel Bany, Alan Knight, Arden Thomas
Podcast #3: Myself, James Robertson, The entire Gemstone GLASS team
The podcasts will be appearing here:
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/cincom/blogView?content=podcasts
You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (just search for smalltalk) or with: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/blog_podcast.xml
They’ll also be announced on James’s blog:
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView
Cheers,
Michael
OLPC on TV
20 August, 2007
From: Michael Haupt,
The German/Swiss/Austrian TV station 3sat has a weekly 30-minute show called “neues” (roughly translated “new things”) which deals with IT-related information. Yesterday’s show was focusing on bringing IT to isolated regions and emerging nations as well as developing countries. The show featured an article on mesh networks in Ecuador and the Linux4Africa project.
Linux4Africa is a German project collecting old but functional hardware. The components are cleaned, repaired (if necessary), bestowed with an Edubuntu Linux installation, and sent to Tanzania and Moçambique.
12 of the show’s 30 minutes were dedicated to an extensive coverage of the OLPC project. Etoys and Squeak were mentioned several times during the feature. The project itself was introduced, and Bert Freudenberg was interviewed about the technical features of the XO laptop, which was presented in detail.
There were also two interviews in the studio. Two members of GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit; German Society for Technical Cooperation) responsible for XO distribution in Ethiopia talked about the project in general and about the impressive progress children made when working with the XO.
The other interview – which filled the first slot in the OLPC coverage – featured two students from Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, who have developed strategic and skill-improving games for the XO in the Software Architecture Group‘s course on software architectures.
All in all, the editorial staff at 3sat did a tremendous job in preparing this show. To the writer’s knowledge, this was the first time the OLPC project was presented at such a level of detail in German television. Germany being a country where the the project has no actual lobby, it is important to have such media coverage – it would be nice to see much, much more of it.
The entire show can be watched online (in German).
Minding Your Business With Smalltalk (Part 3 of 4)
17 May, 2007
Previously we spoke with Michael Rueger and Steve Hunter. From Michael we found out about the perspective of writing and supporting open source software. From Steve we found out what it is like being a consumer of open source software. Today we talk with Bert Freudenberg. From Bert we hope to learn what it is like being a Smalltalk programmer contributing to open source.
Minding Your Business With Smalltalk (part 2 of 4)
13 March, 2007
In our last article we spoke with Michael Rueger.
Today we talk with Steve Hunter. Steve started with OO languages way back in 1985 at General Electric. He used Eiffel, C++, and Objective-C which were the “hot” OO languages at the time. Steve says that he was strongly influenced by Bertrand Meyer’s OO Software Construction Book
Steve’s joined ParcPlace and was impressed by the ease of use and powerful development environment of Smalltalk. Particularly impressive was the VisualWorks debugger, and the cross platform nature of the VM and the dynamic prototyping nature which showed such great potential in market growth.
Steve believed strongly in the benefits of business modeling and saw the merger between Digitalk and ParcPlace as a mismatch of intention between R&D and commercial engineering. In 1995 Steve started Hunter Object Systems and then in 2000 created Agilense. He created EA WebModeler which is a metadata driven modeling solution for Enterprise Architecture and took it to market. Agilense has many very large customers including Sun Microsystems. The most notable component of EA WebModeler for our community is the Squeak based graphical modeler.
I spoke with Steve about EA WebModeler, what it is like depending on Open Source software like Squeak, and more. Read the rest of this entry »
Minding Your Business With Smalltalk (Part 1 of 4)
27 February, 2007
There has been a lot of talk about the future of Smalltalk. There are number of Object Oriented Languages that are candidates for replacing Smalltalk. Why has Smalltalk lasted so long? Why do business software suppliers still choose Smalltalk? Who are the people that still bet on the future of Smalltalk and how do they manage to succeed. Read the rest of this entry »
CIO Insight Interview with Alan Kay
15 February, 2007
CIO Insight magazine has published an interview with Smalltalk’s and Squeak’s father, Alan Kay. The interview, titled “Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped—Now”, covers many topics such as the past, present and future of computing, Squeak and Croquet, the OLPC project and the other initiatives of ViewPoints Research Institute, and the need to reinvent the PC in order for computing to leap forward.
The Weekly Squeak 