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Smalltalk Solutions 2001 Trip Report
John Squeaker writes: "Last week while the rest of the world was worrying about corporations warning, and dot coms failing, 300 smalltalkers got together in Chicago to plan for the future. Given the fact corporations like Dell have canceled their user conference this year we were very pleased with the attendence figures. The conference hosted a key note by Alan Kay, a *must* read, and the mood and general feeling of the show was captured in this excellent trip report. More information on the conference plus links to the papers/tutorials presented there can be found at the conference site. Do you want to know where OO languages like Java, Ruby, Squeak, and SmallScript come from? Then come visit us for the real story, and see what you can expect to hear in the next five years." The whole thing is interesting, but I particularly liked Tuesday. Smalltalkers seem to have a secret from everyone else sometimes ...
I have to do some of my development in Windows, and boy was finding Dolphin Smalltalk a nice thing for me. And no, I'm not some holdover from the 80s - when I started to do programming in the past couple of years (my training is really in mathematics; I wound up here via a winding path), I looked into various languages, tried them out for some of the things that I need to do, and found that two "old-timers" languages (Common Lisp and Smalltalk) fit many of my needs (which, incidentally, are not at all exotic - I do programming for a small trading firm).
It's a shame that so many people have preconceptions about various languages (often formed on the basis of where they were twenty years ago rather than where they've advanced to today) and therefore avoid checking them out to see what good things they can do.
Its now been 3 hours. Attempted to virtualize base methods into my new class, but got distracted by hairs on my right thumb. Also, humming from PC now becoming unbearable. Will go for a walk outside, its sunny and i can hear the birds sing. Mellow/not confusing at all, but nice visuals, especially the traces, which persist for several seconds.
I believe EZBoard is written in Smalltalk
Volkswagen Beetles with code in Smalltalk
Extreme Programming was invented while Kent Beck was consulting on Smalltalk projects
I think that's enough for a start :)
Writing is the only socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. (E. L. Doctorow)
nobody bothered to solve the interesting problems that Java addressed - perfect portability of source and byte codes, a single standard and just-in-time compilation
No, that isn't the case. The free Disney R&D implementation of Smalltalk, Squeak addresses these issues, in some cases profoundly better than does Java.
Indeed, Java hardly offers "perfect portability," the "write-once, run anywhere" claim is marketing hype at its best. It is, in practice, quite difficult to get identical results from any but the most trivial Java programs.
In comparison, a multimedia GUI-based application in Squeak runs pixel-for-pixel IDENTICALLY across a vast array of platforms. I wrote a video game for my wife's birthday in Squeak, complete with animation sound and graphics, from the machine at my Office, a Dell PC Laptop. I sent the image by e-mail to my home, flipped it on her iMac while she slept, fired it up, and it just worked. Identically.
On the other counts, Squeak has a JIT (plus many other nice internal features including object send caching, a sweet and super-fast generational garbage collector), and there is, in fact, an ANSI standard.
Indeed, Smalltalk's source code is virtually identical across implementations. (The syntax, which --in this sense only-- is super-elegant, can be trivially described in a handful of rules). Except for one religious issue (closures for code blocks). Differences in and interoperability problems between implementations derive primarily from the underlying framework libraries provided with those codes -- a problem hardly unique to Smalltalk.