As I'm chatting in the #squeak channel this morning, I was reminded that I had adapted Kent Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns for a half-day Perl coding tutorial. In fact, I referenced this book in a Perl Column I had done for Linux Magazine. If you know both Smalltalk and Perl, you might get a kick out of that.
One of my fond memories of years past was reviewing the frequent submissions to the Internet Ray Tracing Competition (IRTC), being consistently stunned at how Dave Buck's povray could be used to generate some remarkable photorealistic images, even back in the early days when 10 Mhz was a fast machine.
- the OLPC XO is putting Smalltalk into the hands of thousands of young kids
- Cincom and Gemstone are stepping up to support Seaside in a big way
- Gemstone is offering the single-instance free commercial license and GLASS quickstart appliance
- Squeak's license is finally getting cleaned up
- Seaside is reaching a nice level of maturity
- Seaside running on GNU Smalltalk for those that want a command-line environment
- Croquet is maturing, even being adopted as a commercial "virtual meeting" space
- Ruby on Rails has reestablished dynamic languages as useful for the web
I just noticed that I hadn't yet announced here that I've been elected a member of the 2008 Squeak Foundation board! This is quite an honor, as I'm in the company of some very cool people. I promise to deliver a Squeak that remains open source while being usable by the commercial community, especially for web applications, since I hope that Seaside overtakes Ruby on Rails in the near future.
Mark Miller summarizes my appearance on the Lab with Leo where I demonstrate the Etoys OLPC demo:
What Schwartz shows is a typical EToys demo: “driving the car”. The first time most people see this demo they’re amazed, because they’ve never seen software run like this before.
[...] While learning squeak smalltalk and as i immersed myself into the smalltalk culture, i stumbled across Seaside a framework to create web based applications entirely in smalltalk. Seaside kinda blew my mind, i have dabbled with rails it very clean and productive, but Seaside take web based development to a whole new level i never seen highly complex web based applications developed this way. [...]
Found in My journey to Smalltalk. Nicely put.
I was reminded by a few emails and my "getting things done" tickler that today was my last real day to vote in the Squeak Foundation election. It was interesting going through the answers to the 10+1 questions, assigning each candidate a 0, 1, or 2 vote in an Apple Numbers spreadsheet, and then sorting by total score (unweighted). Amazingly, I came out only 4th, but that's because there are clearly others who understood the problems and solutions better than I did, or at least talked about it better. :)
After the long discussions recently on the Squeak Development list, I stumbled across a nice paper that describes the problem with threads. In the introduction, it hits the point square on, with such great paragraphs as:
To offer another analogy, suppose that we were to ask a mechanical engineer to design an internal combustion engine by starting with a pot of iron, hydrocarbon, and oxygen molecules, moving randomly according to thermal forces. The engineer’s job is to constrain these motions until the result is an internal combustion engine. Thermodynamics and chemistry tells us that this is a theoretically valid way to think about the design problem. But is it practical?
