Category: Uncategorized

Mark Guzdial and Georgia Tech used to be boosters of Squeak and Smalltalk. This article explains why they dropped Smalltalk. It comes complete with a post from Alan Kay:

http://computinged.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/lisp-and-smalltalk-are-dead-its-c-all-the-way-down/

It’s clear that Georgia Tech feels it is being both practical and prudent. They have made their world smaller. They aspire to live in a world without doubt. They would have their program provide certainties, not questions. Somebody in a board meeting likely said that students should get a better “return on investment” on the tens of thousands they pay. That is certainly true if the students aspire to be ready-to-fit employees in a corporate programming environment.

Real money is made in innovation. Doubt is an ingredient of the creative process. Innovators aspire to live in as large a world as possible. To shrink one’s world is to shed possibilities.

If Georgia Tech actually told its Reddit-reading freshman students that they will only ever be employees – never owners of a business built on fresh ideas – how many would cheer?

Smalltalk-80 started out using a graphics system called MVC (model view controller) and evolved to use a system from the Self language called Morphic. For those interested in using a Squeak image a little closer to the original Smalltalk-80, two images have appeared. Both are a little closer to the Smalltalk system described in Adele Goldberg’s blue book, which is more formally called Smalltalk: The Language And Its Implementation. Sungjin Chun has created an all MVC image that is 5.7M and can be used for web development with Seaside. Stefan Marr has an even smaller all MVC image at 1.7M. Both are fun to play with and make an educational contrast to contemporary Squeak images.

https://code.google.com/p/nxt-web/downloads/detail?name=ST80-20100805.zip&can=2&q=
https://github.com/downloads/smarr/RoarVM/minimal-MVC.zip

Namespaces allow two classes with the same name to live in a single image. Creating namespaces has been a goal for Squeak since it’s creation. Nothing has seemed quite right. Using Newspeak as his inspiration, Colin Putney has created Environments. Explore this innovation with the mailing list conversation and a downloadable image at http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2012-June/164605.html 

Dan Ingalls was at JSConf in Scottsdale, Arizona in April demoing Lively Kernel. There is a video of his presentation from the event available at:

http://blip.tv/jsconf/jsconf2012-daniel-henry-holmes-ingalls-jr-6106503

Lively Kernel has been evolving for some years now and it will be interesting to see the applications built with it in the near future.

With a transition looming from 32-bit to 64-bit, the VM-dev mailing list had a discussion about what the new object format should be. One of the issues was whether the new object format should have an immutability bit. A wide range of opinions appeared and at times the debate became somewhat heated. It is an interesting discussion for anybody interested in the design and construction of virtual machines.

Cuis now has its own mailing list.

Congratulations, Cuis!

What’s the best way to make a website with Smalltalk? Aida! Join the creator of the Aida web development framework in the Web Team mailing list two weeks from now for an online workshop between the 18th and 22nd. If you have never tried Aida before or are a power user and need tips on how to take your application to the next level, Janko Mivsek will be on hand to help you get started.

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!

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!

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.