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If he gets a reasonable grasp of the principles of these, I assure you he can look forward to a very profitable and rewarding life.

I was browsing for smalltalk info and found this: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/cincom/blogView?content=successes

Oh, but Python is strongly typed.

What, you meant static typing check on function declarations? Well, you can have that in Python, too. But I can't see how that single feature can make a language suitable for enterprise work.

...Why anyone would run their business (or hobby) on a system that is subject to DeActivation.

Defective by Design, indeed.

• Smalltalk - The original OO language and programming environment
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I don't pretend to grok continuations (that's what Seaside does I hear), but an article I have found to be really illuminating explains this in quasi-Basic. The Basic-ish code in that example by the way, is written in what we call continuation passing scheme (CPS). That's basically the extra function tacked onto the argument list passed to functions [instead of f(arg1,arg2), we call f(arg1,arg2, c) where c is the continuation. f does not return as such, but calls c when it is ready to return. Instead of "return some_value;", we call "c(some_value)"].

Of course, continuations are not the solution to everything, but there's a lesson to learn from their usage.

CPS is often what functional programming languages compile into - no one writes code like that manually. You take a program, transform it into CPS, keep doing that, resubstituting variables names, expanding macros, and simplifying functions as necessary, until you are left with a couple of variables (-> registers), and a whole lot of assembler instructions - it has been compiled into assembly language. Now that's a nice compiler!

With hardware (and bandwidth) getting cheaper, I find it hard to believe that Google has actually run out of space. But certainly the explosion in the number of web pages is an issue, especially with auto-generated pages. One current example is the V7ndotcom Elursrebmem SEO contest (white-hat celiac charity site I'm supporting) - that nonsense phrase returned zero results on January 15th, 2006 ... but now returns almost 5,000,000 ... of which I gotta believe the vast majority were NOT typed in by humans.

So maybe it's more that the techniques/algorithms used to spider and index are struggling with the bazillions of web pages out there. Or it could just be disgruntled webmasters PO'ed that their web site isn't listed!

Lots of niches, actually.
See, for example sorting french fries, or in this larger PDF, scheduling all of Deutsche Bahn's trains (page 38) or derivatives trading (page 33 and here), as well as a a variety of other applications. Or there's an example of controlling a semiconductor fab facility, a good many of which are controlled by Adventa's Smalltalk-based products. Or there's continuation-based web stuff like Seaside or Dabble. etcetera. If you'd really like to know more, you might be interested in upcoming conferences such as Smalltalk Solutions.

Smalltalk is used by many commercial endeavors, and often especially for applications which much change very nimbly. Modern Smalltalks are fast, compact and have all the tools you need including refactoring, unit testing, source code management, etc.

Cincom, the largest vendor of Smalltalk products recently announced 88% growth in their Smalltalk business over the last year. http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/

Croquet, an open source initiative created in Smalltalk by some seriously famous computer scientists including Alan Kay, David A. Smith, David P. Reed is taking aim at creating the future of distributed computing. http://opencroquet.org/

Smalltalk is alive and well. :-)

Smalltalk is most certainly in use. There are multiple vendors, and two open source implementations. See:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView

http://smalltalk.cincom.com

http://squeak.org

http://www.stic.org

Intercepting message sends and messages-as-data are commonplace in Smalltalk. The syntax of HOM is kind of neat, granted.

P.S. in Smalltalk you'd say 'array select: [:each | each isFroody]'

Notice how you don't have to play tricks with method dispatching? That's because I'm using a block to inject current context into another context (that created by sending #select:), which , IMHO, is much, much nicer than forwarding messages.

see http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/, http://www.squeak.org/, or http://www.ambrai.com/ (for a Mac specific dialect, unfortunately based on Carbon)

It has been a component of VisualWorks Smalltalk 5i from late 1999. http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/WebServices/

Any SmallTalk developers?

Any Messaging fans?

OpenTalk has been in use by Cincom for the Visualworks smalltalk product for a number of years now. Cincom will no doubt have something to say over apple trademarking the name since it is taken and copyrighted by Cincom. someone might want to let apple know http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/ is Cincom's smalltalk website and you can download it for free and also learn about OpenTalk

Neither Windows nor Unix, but I've set up Feed on Feeds on my webserver and I like it!

It's a "PHP/MySQL server side RSS/Atom aggregator", so you can read your feeds wherever you are, you only need a web browser on the client side.

Pros:
1) you don't need to synchronize the state between the multiple workstations you might use.
2) no platform/os problem on the client side.

Cons:
1) you need some web hosting with PHP and MySQL available (I pay 45 a year for my domain name + 30MB Webspace + 30MB FTP + 30MB MySQL base + 100*25MB pop/imap accounts + SSL everywhere).
2) no installer so you'll need many computing skills to set it up (no that hard).
3) no automated update, you have to click "Update" so you may miss some news when you offline (see away from any internet access) for a long period...

Changed my online life as I no longer have to install anything on the client side (usefull when away from your home/office) or have to synchronize my feeds either with some removable storage (my USB key failed after 250+ daily syncs) or through the net (BottomFeeder, a smalltalk implementation which works on every platform I ever came accross, allows to sync with an FTP location).

Regards,
Poulpy.

I use BottomFeeder. I've used it on Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows, but it also works on Mac OS X, Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, etc. I've found it to be more robust than SharpReader (SharpReader once gave me threadpool errors while updating my 50+ feeds, on dialup). I've yet to use a news aggregator on Linux/FreeBSD that has as many features as BottomFeeder.

Well, if more people used Smalltalk, we might see more interesting applications. Stuff that C# and Java people find revolutionnary has been in Smalltalk for a long time now, just get ahead of your time, use Smalltalk.

You should really take the time to get up to speed on the new stuff if you haven't paid attention since school.

Check out this web-app technology built (first) in squeak, now also available in the descendant to ParcPlace smalltalk (now Cincom Smalltalk)

Also of interest is croquet, a virtual 3d environment. I saw a live demo of this where the presenter (David Smith, one of the engineers) showed his avatar moving between worlds existing one each on two separate machines. It was not fast, but not as slow as you might expect.

Also, smalltalk solutions is next week (in Seattle) so come by if you're interested and available.

P.S. what is now known as Squeak was started at Apple. The Squeak group left Apple during Amelio's reign when the company was gutting it's research depts.

You should really take the time to get up to speed on the new stuff if you haven't paid attention since school.

Check out this web-app technology built (first) in squeak, now also available in the descendant to ParcPlace smalltalk (now Cincom Smalltalk)

Also of interest is croquet, a virtual 3d environment. I saw a live demo of this where the presenter (David Smith, one of the engineers) showed his avatar moving between worlds existing one each on two separate machines. It was not fast, but not as slow as you might expect.

Also, smalltalk solutions is next week (in Seattle) so come by if you're interested and available.

P.S. what is now known as Squeak was started at Apple. The Squeak group left Apple during Amelio's reign when the company was gutting it's research depts.

Ditto -- and I'm delighted to see others jumping first ;-)

I live in hope someone will come up with a similar framework based around mod_python, but I'm not sure if python's continuations are quite good enough...

Seems likely. The meme is spreading, and it's funny how much sense continuations suddenly make when you consider the browser's "back" button and "open link in new window".

Here are some other languages and projects being discussed; note that (1) Python is mentioned as probably having good enough continuations, (2) You don't strictly need full continuations; Paul Graham metions this in his BBN talk about Viaweb.

Here's some links

• Prevalence and continuations
• Some more papers and projects and discussion
• Seaside guy's blog

...or how well that or Seaside would scale.

That's a better question. But you can definitely do replication as long as your proxy server keeps session affinity (and since this is an easy-to-spot part of the URL, that's very doable). Also, one flavor of lisp (SISC?) can persist continuations to disk, so you could share them across servers.

Seaside would be all be fine and good if they only implemented it as an apache module rather than for some obscure Smalltalk-based webserver that nobody beyond a hobbyist with their own webserver is going to get a chance to use for real work.

Competitive advantage, baby. Wait, why am I posting this!?^U

Seriously, if they can build Viaweb and sell it to Yahoo (as Yahoo Stores) using a similar technique, I think you should be able to sell it to clients/bosses.

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showC omments=true&entry=3255420977

The move to Linux may or may not have made sense; what's clear is that the city did not actually examine the project first - they made a political decision without ever looking (seriously) at the technical issues.

Seaside, a "web application framework" written in Smalltalk uses continuations for things like backtracking. The resulting code is said by some to be cleaner and easier to understand than more conventional approaches. The author's blog has some discussion on the matter. There's also a port of Seaside to Ruby called Borges.

But yea, in general, it's hard to see what good call/cc is. It tends to be one of those features that people bring up in "language x vs y" flamewars, but never actually use in practice.

• Squeak
  
• GNU Smalltalk for one.
  
• VisualWorks
  
• Smalltalk/X
  

Smalltalk has been phased out by IBM, and the widget elemnts etc are old.

Squeak is being developed and it's open source: it looks like a toy but its approach to user interaction using "morphs" is interesting.

Cincom (its smalltalk site slashdotted? :) ) is developing version 7 of visualworks smalltalk, and it will surely be out before i finish checking out all the features of version 5 :)

The widgets are a little dated indeed, but being a very modular system there may be GUI enhancements to download, try looking around.

I'm impressed with some smalltalk environment features, like being able to modify some code (which gets dynamically recompiled, no "build" command) and having the changes reflected on the application while it is running, being able to inspect and extend system classes (smalltalk applications merely extend the system, in fact), being able to save and restore all classes and variables i'm working with in a single image file or in distinct packages.

I'd like to know if there is a java environment with similar features.

Dolphin Smalltalk has a plugin as well. However, like Dolphin Smalltalk itself, it is Win32 only.

One of the bigger, more business oriented Smalltalks, VisualWorks, also has a plugin. It looks like it too is Win32 only, but VisualWorks itself is cross-platform, and runs on Windows, Mac OS, and a big number of Unices.

The coolest plug-in for a language I've ever seen has got to be Oberon's Juice, by far. Unlike the Java and Squeak VM plug-ins, which take bytecode for their respective VMs, the Juice plugin takes pre-parsed Oberon code and compiles and executes it on the fly. This makes for really fast applets. I tried it a while back and it took a heckuva lot less time for Juice to download, compile, and execute the applet than it took for a comparitive Java applet to start up. Really cool stuff. However, it seems it's not been maintained in a while, and is Windows and Mac only. Seeing how Oberon itself has source available (IIRC), I'm sure that some Oberon enthusiast who wanted to get a generized Unix version going of Juice could do so.