Posts (page 2)
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: ''
The InfoQ website interviewed me recently about Smalltalk and Seaside and Squeak. It's a nice article with a lot of external references. Check it out!
I keep mentioning Squeak Smalltalk as I'm chatting with Leo Laporte while taping my well received podcast FLOSS Weekly. It's actually quite fun. He keeps bringing it up as something he's learning, and I think it's giving a big visibility to Squeak and to Smalltalk in general. There's even talk of creating a special Learning Squeak series that would be shown on Leo's live webcast network. Check it out!
Found this nice posting on RIck's blog:
I really like seeing the resurgence of interest in my second most favorite programming language
One of the comments to the referenced Gartner Group blog post had a link to an IBM Developer Works article about using using Eclipse as a Smalltalk IDE.
It seems like a strange loop, since Eclipse is the descendant of IBMs old VisualAge. Now I happen to know a bit about this since I was involved at the beginning. I guess that enough time has passed that nothing I say here will affect anyone’s business.
Check it out!
We interviewed two of the developers from the GNUstep project this week on FLOSS Weekly (episode 44). After seeing that I can write an Objective C program that runs natively on OSX, but could relatively easily be ported to Windows and nearly anything that runs X11, I'm inspired to go finish learning Objective C and the Cocoa framework and start hacking some real code.
From the blog of Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner group, we see:
...
So Yeah.. I said it. Smalltalk is making a comeback.
...
Bottom line:
1) If you have investments in Smalltalk consider the risk of the language to be lower over the next 3 years than the last 3 years. Smalltalk is cool again. Is it the start of a long term trend or a fad? Yet to been seen.
2) If you are BIG fan of dynamics languages (closures, meta programming, and all that cool stuff) then consider giving Smalltalk a look. You might like what you see. Its like Ruby but with bigger muscles. You think Rails is cool? Check out seaside.
In the end we’ll see a up tick in Smalltalk momentum over the next few years. I’m not entirely sure it will be enough to change the long term trend of a declining developer base but I does my heart good to see a “members only” jacket come back into style nonetheless.
Looks like Refactory Inc is offering a mostly-ANSI Smalltalk on Microsoft's .NET platform with an apparently open-source-ish license. Not sure if it'll run on Mono. Not sure why they didn't pick a standard open source license so that I wouldn't have to read the fine print. But there it is.
As I was reading the latest entry in Brett Hallett's blog, titled "Rewriting a script into a callable method", I saw the code:
i := 20.
d := '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'.
l := d size.
s := String new: i.
1 to: i do: [ :x |
s at: x put: (d at: (Random between: 1 and: l))
].
s printNl.
sourceCharacterSet := '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'.
