Smalltalk and Cloud Foundry
James Foster takes Smalltalk off to the cloud.
Pharo in France
There's a two day Pharo Conference coming up in May, in France. You can get details and register here.
Smalltalk at FosDem
This sounds like the kind of thing that will help get Smalltalk a bit more notice:
One of my major stumbling blocks with Smalltalk has been general unfamiliarity with the development environment, the workshop was the perfect opportunity to resolve some of this. The structure was to pair one experienced Smalltalker with one noob, and for both to work through a pre-planned exercise with an existing image and application set up.
ESUG and the STIC conferences are useful, but getting Smalltalk into the hands of new users requires some outreach. I'm glad to see that happening.
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Readability is Key
The fact that even bad Smalltalk "reads" fairly well is probably the thing I like best about it. The project I'm on now has the normal share of bad objects (any large project will have them) - but even the bad code can still be parsed by the mark one eyeball better than just about anything else out there. As David Nolen puts it:
Smalltalk has so very few concepts - it's truly stunning. There's nothing more powerful in aiding readability than a small core set of concepts. In this sense I think Smalltalk continues to be one of the few languages to get anywhere near LISP. Most languages these days are just an abomination of features trapped inside of a compiler.
The way I like to explain that to people is this: The entire syntax of Smalltalk can fit on an index card. How many pages does it take to explain the syntax of, say, Java?
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Smalltalk at FosDem
Via Torsten comes news from FosDem - a report, presentation, and photos.
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Smalltalk and Git
Someone has made a standard file based SCM tool work with Smalltalk:
We've built a little package that allows us to save all our source in git. We've been developing with this for 3 months now, and it's pretty stable. I put a project on github, that contains some more info on it. Yes, there's more work to do, but there's hope. The repo contains some examples that I just saved from the image.
I'd like to hear more about how well that works.
Smalltalk and Large Projects
Dave Buck and I were discussing podcast topics, and we came across this InfoQ interview with Ralph Johnson and Joe Armstrong. This is what we decided to talk about:
Because in Smalltalk you have everything in the image. You can't keep track of the versions between the old and the new one - it's a pain in the neck but also now we are going to this distributed computing or parallel programming. People say "We want to have multiple threads inside Smalltalk." No, you don't want to do that! Because you are just getting back to all those problems. What you want to do is have multiple images in sending messages back and forth if you want fault tolerance.
It started years ago more but because we had this way of doing things, we just put everything in one image and there is also the issue of complexity. You build a system, so it gets to the limit of what a few people can do and there Smalltalk doesn't work too well. If it actually took 20 people to build your system, Smalltalk is not very good. If you could build it with 4-5 people, fine. They all sit in the room and Smalltalk is just fabulous and you could build with 4-5 people something that would take 50 people in Java, but what if it would take 200 people in Java?
We'll get into that when we record, but two points:
- The system I work on now has nearly 5500 classes in it, and it's managed by around 20 developers
- Any project that has 200 developers (regardless of language) will grow a process that makes forward motion impossible. I've seen that happen, more than once
With that said, wait for episode 63 to come out - this is what we'll be talking about.
Pharo Sprints in February
There will be two Pharo Code prints in February - follow the link for details.
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Smalltalk in London
The UK Smalltalk Users Group is meeting on January 30th, and the topic will be IDEs:
Building software is a complex business, software that works and stays in production for years. It is a craft that involves engineering, insight and skill. The tools that we use to build that software are vital enablers to our success. Between 1997-2004 the dominance of Java and the main vendors’ tools strategies led to something of a stagnation for IDEs. But since then with the return to language diversity and the broadening of platforms there has been a real opportunity to experiment with what an IDE is and means and to look at how it could evolve. We will look at a range of IDEs including WebVelocity, Cloud9 and Codea and contrast them with more traditional IDEs such as VisualWorks, IntelliJ’s IDEA and Eclipse.
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