Methods and Messages: Randal Schwartz on Smalltalk

Interviewed on Linux Outlaws and The Command Line podcasts

2009-11-01T03:20:52Z

I was recently interviewed on both The Linux Outlaws and The Command Line podcasts. While the interviews are general coverage of my life so far, I did manage to sneak a bit of Smalltalk and Seaside content into both of them. I especially made it clear that I've been hacking Smalltalk since 1982, long before Perl was even around.

The Linux Outlaws interview came about because a group of us open-source podcasters were talking about "bumper trading", where we make up 30-second promos for our show, and then send it to others in exchange for playing their bumper on our show. I don't play other people's bumpers on FLOSS Weekly, but I said that in exchange for interviewing me on someone's show, I'd be sure to mention that show on the following show of mine. I've heard that because of my mention of Outlaws on FLOSS, they had to upgrade to the next hosting plan for the rapid increase in downloads. Good work, guys!

The Command LIne show is one of the best produced shows I've heard. The host reads from a fully prepared script, and the resulting show has detailed show notes and chapters and well-produced musical stingers to identify each portion of the show. It's definitely on my "must listen" list, even if I must skip forward to different parts (easy, thanks to chapter marks) if I'm in a hurry.

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Why is Cincom not mentioning GemStone/S in application wins?

2009-08-27T01:50:02Z

Apparently, according to James Robertson in 2004, GemStone/S played a significant part to have JP Morgan's Kapital application be a success. But when I look at the much hailed press release in 2009 from Cincom Corporate Marketing (including the detailed PDF), no mention is made at all of GemStone/S. What happened? Did they rewrite the whole thing to talk to Oracle? Not likely! Even Dale Hendrichs of GemStone confirms that as late as 2007, Kapital was still a GemStone/S application.

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Smalltalk Week at OSCON

2009-07-14T21:34:25Z

Next week at OSCON 2009 in San Jose is going to be a very busy week for me. I'm managing the Stonehenge/LinuxFund party on Wednesday night, which includes hanging out at the LinuxFund booth during the day on Wednesday. I'm also appearing at the usual O'Reilly Author meet-and-greet Wednesday evening.

I had also been accepted some months ago to teach a paid 4-hour tutorial "Introduction to Web Application Development Using Smalltalk Seaside" on Monday afternoon, and a 45-minute talk "Persistence Solutions with the Smalltalk Seaside Web Framework" on Thursday morning. For some reason (which I'll blame on the drama around my broken arm), I forgot to blog about those here, although I'm sure I Twittered about it. :)

But on top of that, I had originally pitched an "intro to smalltalk" course that would precede my Seaside talk to prepare people for the afternoon talk. It had been summarily rejected, and now I know why. Avi Bryant (co-creator of Seaside) had been given that task Monday morning. But he wrote me a couple of days ago, asking me to take the talk over, as apparently he will be unable to make it to OSCON. So, now I'm also doing roughly the talk I had originally pitched as well: "Finding the Swan in Squeak's Ugly Duckling" on Monday morning. And I'm now scrambling to prep for that too, although a lot of it had already been planned for my 5-day "intro to Smalltalk and Seaside" course that Stonehenge will be offering soon.

So, there was one talk on Smalltalk last year at OSCON, and now three talks this year (including two paid tutorials). I'd say Smalltalk is making a good comeback.

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Industry experts predicting losses

2009-06-07T16:52:30Z

From a comment on a recent post on James Robertson's "Industry Misinterpretations" blog (offered without comment):

"Industry experts estimate that the collective worldwide programmer productivity losses by failing to use Smalltalk-based environments (such as Cincom's VisualWorks) could approach 700,000 dollars per day."

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Why I like Smalltalk: lots of reflection

2009-05-30T03:08:16Z

From a recent post by Travis Griggs ....

p := 4 @ 3.
p changeClassTo: (p class copy superclass: p class).
p class methodDictionary at: #negated put: (p class methodDictionary at: #transpose).
p negated

Amazing. This creates a new anonymous class for the Point, and mucks with the method dictionary. At runtime. Yum.

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The Io Language - so close, yet so far

2009-05-04T05:06:45Z

It’s too bad the Io language has an implicit non-overridable “asBoolean” method in the Object base class. That’s a mistake… the same one Ruby and Perl made. Only Smalltalk gets that right.

it’d be ok if I could at least override “asBoolean” for my classes as far as ifTrue: and ifFalse: are concerned, but no. Io has its own idea, and that’s that. And I can’t even get it to throw a “must be boolean” error instead. Sigh. So close, and yet so far away.

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Lightning strikes in Omaha, not once, but twice

2009-04-08T02:26:11Z

I'm presenting my "Seaside: Your next web framework" advocacy talk next week in Omaha. Not once, but twice.

First, I've been scheduled for a few months to be a speaker at Infotec on April 15. That's a paid conference with a lot of interesting IT and Business Data Processing information. I think you can still register for that.

But, because of a random coincidence of instant messages, and thanks to Andy Lester, a fellow Perl hacker who is also talking at Infotec, I'm now scheduled to appear at the Omaha Dynamic Languages monthly meeting, on April 14th, and that's free!

So, if you're somewhere in the flyover states, c'mon out and see me!

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Great quote about the Smalltalk IDE

2009-03-22T14:03:13Z

Found in a recent Stackoverflow comment:

Trying to get your head around smalltalk without using the IDE is like going to Paris and eating at McDonalds. Sure, you're in Paris, but you aren't really exposing yourself to what it's all about.

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Putting my hat in the ring for Squeak Leadership Team 2009

2009-02-20T02:01:39Z

As I just posted to squeak-dev:

In trying to recap this past year, my first year of being back into the Smalltalk world, I googled "randal schwartz squeak", and saw:

Results 1 - 10 of about 5,910 for (randal OR randall) schwartz squeak.

I think about 5700 of those pages didn't exist a year ago. Here's the highlights:

Created my blog methodsandmessages.vox.com to publish squeak news and observations
Demonstrated Squeak and Scratch on the "Lab with Leo" show, hosted by Leo Laporte and distributed in Canada and Australia
Had both Avi Bryant and Dan Ingalls on FLOSS Weekly, my weekly podcast with an audience of about 25,000 or so. Squeak was mentioned once or twice. :)
Managed to sneak a mention of Smalltalk and Squeak into just about every other episode of FLOSS Weekly
Got Leo Laporte thinking about a weekly Seaside tutorial video podcast, in which we would run through my courseware to teach him (and the audience, by proxy) how Seaside and Squeak works
Provided the weekly Squeak News segment for James Robertson's Industry Misinterpretations podcast, broading the continued presence and currency of Squeak throughout the Smalltalk community
In my role as Leadership Team member, coordinated the cutover of the squeak.org to Aida, and am currently sheparding the Squeak 4.0 relicense effort
Established the meme "the year of Smalltalk" in my blog, which has been used as a unifying rallying cry to help the resurgence in 2008
Got the Brazillian FISL conference interested enough in Smalltalk from my 2008 presentation that they created an entire Smalltalk/Squeak miniconf for 2009 (which I'm just now putting out the CFP for, by the way)
Got interviewed by InfoQ about the Smalltalk Comeback, where I mentioned Squeak prominently
Got interviewed by WebDevRadio about Seaside, mentioning Squeak at least a few times
Got interviewed by Reflective Surface, a blog about Ruby-ish things about Seaside and Squeak
Produced a keynote talk at STIC's Smalltalk Solutions 2008, which included my Seaside talk and a Persistence talk, both incorporating many mentions of Squeak
Gave a three-hour lecture at OSCON 2008 on Smalltalk and Seaside, using Squeak as the primary demonstration tool
Produced a few videos for Vimeo on how to use Squeak, and got a few other people using Vimeo for hosting, including creating a Squeak group there
Created a "Seaside Bootcamp" class, to be delivered by BigNerdRanch in Germany in a few months
Promoted Squeak via watching various twitter and blog messages for mentions of Smalltalk, Seaside, and Squeak
Answered many questions on squeak-dev, beginners, and seaside mailing lists.
Hung out in the #squeak, #seaside, and ##smalltalk channels on freenode, and the #smalltalk channel on Parcplace, answering questions and occasionally annoying the other locals
Gave the "Seaside: your next web framework" advocacy presentation at many companies and conferences, which features Squeak as one of the many Smalltalk implementations that runs Seaside
Presented a talk on Squeak GLORP at the PostgreSQL day in Portland
Got interviewed by GeekCred podcast for a general biography, but managed to get Squeak mentioned in there once or twice
Answered Smalltalk and Squeak-related questions on Stack Overflow

Ok, I'll stop there. I'm sure there's three important things I'm leaving out, and 20 trivial things.

Looking back at this list, all I can say is... "oops, I set the bar too high for my second year". :)

But seriously, I have dedicated, and continue to dedicate, my time and energy and attention and skills to promoting Squeak as the basis for a sane programming environment to make it easier for all of us to get things done, and cooperate and collaborate in an open-source way to avoid repeating ourselves.

I would be honored to serve a second term on the Leadership Team, to help complete the relicensing effort, and work with all parties to figure out what Squeak 5.0 needs to be. We're at an interesting point in Squeak's development (think: "the teenage years"), and continuity with the past and a vision for the future are cruicial.

Please consider me as you cast your ballot.

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Comparing Smalltalk and Java

2009-02-07T19:53:14Z

In "On OOA and Simplicity (Part 1)", Samuel Falvo says:

In short, it'll take you, the programmer, substantially longer to implement a properly OO solution to any problem in Java than it would in Smalltalk. What this means is that a company will shell out more cash for proper OO solutions in Java than they would in Smalltalk. Period. The economics and the laws of physics agree on this one.

Well summarized, and the rest of the article provides the justification.

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