Posts
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."
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
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.
I'm presenting my "Seaside: Your next web framework" advocacy talk next week in Omaha. Not once, but twice.
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.
As I just posted to squeak-dev:
Results 1 - 10 of about 5,910 for (randal OR randall) schwartz squeak.
- 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
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.
In response to a question posted on StackOverflow, a number of us came forward to say how Smalltalk is being used in the real world. It wasn't a total whitewash... there were some genuine (but surmountable) concerns expressed. The original poster then summarized on his blog:
While some answers exposed difficulties when using Smalltalk, most of them were void after some explanations. Smalltalk was presented as right choice for demanding and complex environments where high flexibility, robustness and speed of development are main requirements.
I encourage you to read all answers and consider Smalltalk as a possible solution for your next projects.
In this recent post, Loren Segal begins a nice long post with:
The interesting part is that playing with Seaside is completely unlike learning Smalltalk (unless you’ve never seen a language with lambdas). It’s a complete mind-blowing experience on its own level; a revolutionary way to look at web application development, not "let’s do what Ruby on Rails does.. in Smalltalk!".
Read the rest of the post... he's got a good simple example of what continuations are all about.
Since I spent 20 minutes just now trying to remember how I did this six months ago, the magic incantation to have Seaside respond at / instead of /seaside/ is:
WADispatcher default setName: ''
