The Weekly Squeak

Category: Publicity

  • Smalltalk: the past, the present, and the future?

    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.

  • Calling all Smalltalkers!

    Luc Fabresse invites all Smalltalkers to submit your Smalltalk based software to the 7th ESUG Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, €500, €300 and €200 during an awards ceremony at the 18th International Smalltalk Joint Conference 2010 in Barcelona, Spain.

    No constraints are put on the software except that it should be Smalltalk-based or Smalltalk-related and all flavours of Smalltalk are accepted. Last year’s entries included student projects, one-man labours of love, and full commercial applications.

    Don’t forget that early registrations for the conference are only open for another month. You can register at http://registration.esug.org/ (running on Seaside). This server comes with new features: you can now do a group registration and make a single payment; it also allows you to book and pay for reduction tickets (typically for Golden and Platinum sponsors).

    The ESUG 2010 conference preliminary schedule is available at http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010

  • Smalltalks 2009 videos and photos available

    Hernan Wilkinson wrote to the squeak -dev mailing list that the Smalltalks 2009 presentations are available now at the Smalltalks Conference site under the “Talks” tab. Given that the speakers included such well-known figures as Dan Ingalls, Stephane Ducasse, Alex Warth, Tim Mackinnon, James Foster and Travis Griggs, there should be some fascinating viewing to be had.

    Hernan added: “You can watch also the video used during the presentation that summarizes the previous two years of the conference, it is a very nice video. It is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekRhvg7W6AQ“.

    There are also links to other videos and pictures from the conference home page.

  • Scratch featured in “Communications of the ACM”

    Scratch is the cover story of the November 2009 issue of CACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery.

    Scratch is a visual programming language, developed in Squeak, that makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share these creations on the web. Aimed at children between the ages of 8 and 16, Scratch has developed a thriving community, with over 1000 new projects being uploaded to the site every day.

    In inviting the Scratch team to submit an article, the editor of CACM explained his motivation: “A couple of days ago, a colleague of mine (CS faculty) told me how she tried to get her 10-year-old daughter interested in programming, and the only thing that appealed to her daughter (hugely) was Scratch.”

    The submitted article is also available for viewing online.

  • Return To Smalltalk

    NY-Skyline

    The NYC Smalltalk group manages an active programme of talks and presentations, and this month’s talk looks to be very interesting. Daniel Antion, Vice President of Information Services at American Nuclear Insurers, discusses why his company began planning to migrate away from Smalltalk, and the evolving circumstances that caused them to take the difficult decision to reverse this strategy.

    Dan has been working in Smalltalk since 1994 and develops most of ANI’s transaction processing systems. Dan has presented at Smalltalk Solutions, OOPSLA and the AIIM Expo on topics related to systems development, content management and SharePoint.

    Dan’s experience and position within ANI mean that he can offer some real insights into the perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of Smalltalk from a corporate perspective, and the ongoing challenges it faces. He says “I’m not sure we saved Smalltalk forever but we bought it some serious time. The technical details that work for Smalltalk include its stability, malleability and extensibility. We still have concerns but we think they can be mitigated.”

    If you’re going to be in New York on 18th November, find out more about Dan’s talk on the NYC Smalltalk website.

    (Image by meironke on flickr)

  • Smalltalks 2009

    smalltalks

    Following on from their high-profile presence at ESUG this year, the Argentinian Smalltalk community are preparing to host their third annual domestic Smalltalk conference, Smalltalks 2009.

    Running from 19th to 21st November in Buenos Aires, the conference’s goal is to “gather both the Argentine and International Smalltalk community to get connected sharing our work and experience with regards to Smalltalk or related topics”.

    The conference will have two streams: “Research and Education” for research and education work done with Smalltalk in universities and public or private
    entities; and “Industry and Development” for presentations related to Smalltalk software developed by companies or individuals, both public and private.

    In addition, the event will host a Smalltalk programming contest.  As in previous years, well known personalities from the international community will attend the conference.

    All those connected with Smalltalk, be it faculty, students, researchers, developers or entrepreneurs, are invited to participate, free of charge, as presenters and members of the audience.

    In addition, early registrants get a great-looking T-shirt for free, so get your bookings in now!

  • ESUG Innovation Technology Awards – Time is running out!

    esug-logo

    The Innovation Technology Awards session is one of the real highlights of the annual International Smalltalk Conference organised by ESUG each year.

    Noury Bouraqadi has just posted to remind everyone that you only have until 1st July to nominate your work for an award. Put together a brief description of your work, which can be in any Smalltalk dialect, make it available for inspection online, and be prepared to demonstrate it to a constant stream of inquisitive Smalltalkers during the conference, and you could win up to €500 in addition to the recognition and respect of your peers.

    Have a look at Noury’s site for an introduction to the ideas that have proved popular in the past, or our own details of last year’s winners.

    All the administrative details can be found on the ESUG 2009 website – so get those application forms in now!

    And in case you’ve forgotten, this year’s conference is in Brest, France from 31 August—4 September, 2009. It will be preceded by Camp Smalltalk running on the weekend of 29—30 August 2009, and incorporates the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies on 31 August.

  • Back to the Future: Programming in Smalltalk

    back-to-the-future

    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.

  • The Revenge of Smalltalk

    Despite recent discussions over what killed Smalltalk, there continues to be lots of interest in the language and in Seaside in particular. Anyone based near London will be able to find out more about both topics at a talk dramatically titled “Seaside: The Revenge of Smalltalk“.

    This “Geek Night” is going to cover how Smalltalk makes web development different and how Seaside is being put to use in the “Real World”. Participants will learn about real object-orientated programming rather than class-orientated programming.

    The two presenters are Lukas Renggli, who will be talking about Squeak and the world of Open Source Smalltalk; and Michel Bany from Cincom who will be discussing how Seaside and Smalltalk has been used in companies like JP Morgan.

    The talk is hosted by Thoughtworks‘ London office on Monday 6th July, 2009 from 7:00pm—10:00pm.

  • Squeak and Seaside BOFs at OOPSLA ’08

    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.