Smalltalk with James Robertson

Joachim has some ideas for cleaning up the differences between assert:/should: and deny:/shouldnt: in SUnit. Since the latter messages take blocks (while the former take boolean expressions), he wants to add (or assume it's been added) #value to object and put all of the functionality in the first set of messages.

I recall many a debate over having #value in Object, and I know that it was removed from VisualWorks a few releases ago (although every project I've ever seen has added it back). Joachim's ideas seem reasonable to me; Simpler is usually better.

Technorati Tags: sunit, testing

YesPlan - event planning software written in Seaside (using Pharo and GLASS) - have released a series of videos showing off the software

Technorati Tags: seaside, glass, pharo

This sounds really interesting:

The good fellows in Haskell land came up with a nice idea one day: instead of relying on a programmer writing well-thought out tests, with test data designed to flush out edge cases, they realised that people aren’t very good at finding bugs in their own code. The real world is too random, too crazy, to leave us alone. Things break in production for reasons we would never anticipate. So why don’t we, as part of our testing process, throw some randomness at our tests? So that’s just what QuickCheck does. You specify a property - something you hold to be true for all your Foos - and QuickCheck will test your property by generating test cases. If it finds a counterexample, it figures out a minimal version of that counterexample and prints it out.

Developers not only make mistakes, you often hear people say that "there's no time for testing". This looks like it would lend a hand in both cases.

Technorati Tags: testing

new name, new website:

Amber, formerly known as Jtalk, is an implementation of the Smalltalk-80 language. It is designed to make client-side development faster and easier. It allows developers to write client-side heavy web applications in Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: jtalk, amber

This is the sort of thing that all Smalltalkers - myself included - take for granted - that the code pane of the browser is just a special purpose workspace. It's interesting to note how unusual that is for developers who don't use Smalltalk much:

Notice that there is no UI for creating new methods! There's a strange and subtle shift in UI design thinking in effect here. Instead of the purpose of the code pane being to "edit some little snippet of code already associated with the current class", thereby necessitating UI for creating new methods, its purpose is to "interpret any submitted piece of code in the context of the current class", thereby permitting both definition of new methods and updates to existing methods.

This is, to my way of thinking, a wonderful thing about Smalltalk, but: it is the sort of thing that throws newcomers off at first.

MetaCello 1.0 is out:

Metacello 1.0-beta.30 was released this afternoon. This release has a couple of bugfixes and some more significant performance improvements.

Technorati Tags: gemstone, metacello

I hit something of a milestone just now - I got our app (or at least, a version of it) to start in VW 7.8. There are still bunches of overrides to address, but this is good. I had the code loading last week, but the hurdle was in the database code. As it happens, I'm migrating an older version of the codebase (for an outside user of the app), and the code in question has since changed in the main codebase. The lead architect here spotted the problem immediately, and there's been steady progress ever since. Next, I'm going to try and publish base VW 7.8 and see how that goes....

Technorati Tags: visualworks, upgrade

Pharo is moving ahead, with an assist from Gemstone:

On the Sunday before ESUG (August 21), the Pharo folks started using ss3 for storing their Pharo 1.4 work - SqueakSource had crashed one too many times. Consequently we are resuming work on SS3 and are committed to taking SS3.gemstone.com into production. The warning that packages stored in SS3 will not be preserved beyond the Alpha period has been withdrawn and we have instituted daily backups for the site. We are still in the alpha period, but the basic operation of the site is sound. Tobias Pape has bugfixes queued up for most, if not all of the outstanding bugs and we will be working towards pushing the fixes into production over the coming weeks.

Technorati Tags: pharo, version control

Learn Smalltalk in your browser:

ProfStef is a nice app to teach you Smalltalk. It is now ported from Pharo to JTalk (a Smalltalk running on JavaScript) too so it is available online now.

Technorati Tags: jtalk

Looks like you can get Squeak for Android now, although it's still early days:

I am pleased to announce that the Android port of Stack Cog has reached the public alpha stage, and the first pre-built apk file is available for downloading. This is a debug-signed Android package. When installed, it uses the Pharo icon (to distinguish from the Squeak package in case it is installed). In the future, I'll change the icon to something different.

Technorati Tags: android