Transcript show: 'Hello, world!', cr

Welcome to my newest blog!

If you know me already, you probably know me as "Just another Perl hacker".  While it's true that I've been involved with Perl in a big way for nearly all of its 20 years, I've actually been coding in Smalltalk even before that!

My first experience with Smalltalk was reading all of the Smalltalk articles in that famous Byte Magazine... you know, the one with the colorful balloon on the cover.  I kept thinking "wow, this looks like a cool language... maybe some day I'll get to play with it for real."

I didn't have to wait long.  My group at Tektronix (Engineering Computing Systems) was exploring the "next gen" computing platform in 1982.  As part of our research, Teklabs loaned us a Magnolia: a 68K-based machine running the official Smalltalk80-Release1 image.  I spent countless hours playing with the machine, teaching myself Smalltalk, and being fascinated at how every bit of the code was available.  I learned how the windows were being drawn, and how the mouse reacted to events.  I even tried to understand how the compiler created the bytecodes, but that was a bit beyond me at the time.

My former Tek boss called me up from his new company, Servio Logic.  I joined them in 1983 as a system administrator, and one of my tasks was to maintain... a Xerox Dolphin.  See, this startup wanted to create an new kind of industrial-grade database that could be programmed in a high-level object language rather than SQL. They had chosen to create a Smalltalk-like language, but I remember nudging the lead developers into restricting the syntax into Smalltalk syntax.  I had imagined that some day, this Smalltalk thing would catch on, and it'd be nice to move code transparently between the GUI and the database.  And that's the choice they took to create the Gemstone database, later changing the company name to match the product.

After leaving Servio, it would be a long time before I'd see Smalltalk again, except referenced in articles.  I think I played with an Apple Lisa that ran ST80, but it would have been only for a brief time.

Then, along came Squeak.  As I was already a Mac user, Squeak fascinated me.  I downloaded the OS9 (8? 7?) compatible early images, and started playing around, and felt like I was coming home again.  I've been active on the Squeak mailing list since near the beginning, although shocking a few people from time to time who thought I would only do Perl.  I even used Squeak at a Web conference in 99 to demonstrate rapid website prototyping, so it wasn't like Perl was my only gig even then.

Throughout my Perl career, I constantly referred to Smalltalk, saying that "you don't really know objects until you've used a real object language, like Smalltalk."  And I turned many people on to Squeak to experience it firsthand.

But as luck would have it, my former boss at Servio (now Gemstone), Monty Williams, called me up a few months ago to nudge me about the new product they were announcing: a price adjustment for the Gemstone/S products (free for small installations!), and a packaging of Gemstone with Seaside to create a rapid develop-and-deploy environment for fancy web applications ("GLASS").  I had not seen Seaside before, and the more I looked, the more I liked!

I did a trial development with one of my clients to replace a Perl-based web app with a Seaside-based app, and we both liked what we saw, so I'm continuing development of that. But yes, this means that I've finally popped my commercial Smalltalk "cherry": I'm being paid for coding in Smalltalk.  And only 25 years after my first "do-it"!

Over the past couple of months, I've decided that I would introduce Seaside consulting and training into the offerings of Stonehenge.  I really think that anyone that is looking at Ruby On Rails for a startup should consider Seaside as well.  But part of the barrier to having Seaside as a choice is having enough support, and that's where I can enter as Stonehenge.  We already have a confirmed track record in producing industrial strength trainings and consulting services for Perl, so migrating into Smalltalk and Seaside should be a natural fit.  And given the much-more-OO-nature of Perl 6, it's also a natural crossover with new materials for Perl 6 as well.

So, I've created this blog, to hopefully post with some regularity about things I'm discovering about Seaside or Smalltalk or Squeak, and maybe solicit feedback about what's most needed and wanted for my company directions.  Feel free to comment here, or email me privately at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks for reading!