The Weekly Squeak

The Altitude web framework has reintroduced work done on a new streams library – Xtreams. Traditional Smalltalk-80 streams have served well for decades. Michael Lucas-Smith and Martin Kobetic started Xtreams as an attempt to distill some of their experience into a new implementation of streams. A great video of the 2010 ESUG talk is available…

Alan Kay gave a talk at the ACM’s Turing Centenary Celebration. He used VPRI’s Frank (as in “Frankenstein’s monster”) research prototype, which is a built on top of Squeak4.3. To see the twenty minuted video, choose “Extracting Energy From the Turing Tarpit” from the playlist at the ACM’s website. http://turing100.acm.org/index.cfm?p=webcast

Colin Putney has released a new web framework called Altitude. Strongly influenced by Seaside, it is resource based instead of session based. It uses the new stream library Xtreams in conjunction with Filesystem, an extensible framework replacing the FileDirectory class. These posts explain how to get it, how it is different, and how to create…

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…

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…