Smalltalk with James Robertson

The NYC Smalltalk User's Group has their next meeting set for September 22 - follow the link for time and location details:

Sean DeNigris is the President and Lead Scientist of Clipper Adams, a NYC-based consulting firm. His mission is to support people in fulfilling on what matters to them. Therefore, most of his current work is on realizing Doug Engelbart’s vision of making a difference in the world by using computers to enhance human intellect. For ten years, he has gotten into the minds of users and created the business software they would have created (if they knew how to program). He is also a regular contributor to Squeak and Pharo, and participates in the Smalltalk community and its conferences world-wide.

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There have been some pretty major changes to the way memory is handled in VisualWorks in the 7.7.1 release - and that means that there have been changes for ObjectStudio 8.2.1 as well, since it's built on top of VisualWorks. You should really have a look at the release notes for 7.7.1, and the class comments for AbstractMemoryPolicy. This visual of the new hierarchy makes it clear what's changed:

Class MemoryPolicy is mostly a "legacy" class now, and is not the default one in use. The default is LargeGrainMemoryPolicy, as internal testing in Cincom engineering indicated that it performed best in the widest variety of situations.

Your mileage may vary, of course - so again, have a look at the docs.

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There have been some big changes at Instantiations recently - Google bought their Java business, and now the company is focused only on Smalltalk. With that in mind, we have John O'Keefe - long time Smalltalker and the principal Smalltalk architect at Instantiations - coming on "Industry Misinterpretations" this Tuesday at 1 PM EDT. You can wait for the podcast to be released next Sunday, or listen live at justin.tv.

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There's a new Ubuntui AMI (Amazon ec2 instance) set up with a Pharo based Seaside image installed. There's also an Amazon instance out there for the Cincom Smalltalk WebVelocity eval - the image id for the latter is ami-871ef5ee

Update: Jan van de Sandt has a post up explaining how to get started with the instance

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Looks like Build tools for Smalltalk are finally starting to catch up. The Squeak/Pharo world has Gofer, the engineering team at Cincom has just released a project tool as part of the summer release (with more work in that direction to come), and Ernest Micklei pushed out a build tool for VA Smalltalk earlier this summer:

Melissa is a simple tool that can help in building development and runtime images in a continous integration environment. It is being used extensively to create daily builds for Smalltalk images. This post describes the steps to use Melissa for VA Smalltalk 8+

A lot of people yawn at these kinds of tools, but they are essential in order to reliably build applications. It's good to see activity here.

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The deadline for submitting a paper/talk for Smalltalks 2010 has been extended to September 25th. The conference takes place in Buenos Aires (Argentina) November 11-13.

If you're submitting a paper, they want you to use EasyChair.

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The online book, "Pharo By Example" continues to grow - a new draft chapter on the OmniBrowser (PDF) has been added.

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This is pretty cool - Chris Cunnington (the guy behind Smalltalk TV) has pulled the MPEG player out of Sophie and made it a standalone Squeak project.

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I noticed that Smalltalk fell out of the top 50 in the Tiobe rankings; I think it's not just the niche status of Smalltalk at work here, but also the nature of Smalltalk code. What do I mean by that?

Well, consider what happens when you search for the more mainstream (file based) languages - you get code listings. When you search for Smalltalk, on the other hand, you'll get links to things like the "One Click Image" for Seaside. The image based nature of Smalltalk, and the fact that Smalltalk developers don't work in flat text files, impacts your ability to find Smalltalk code references.

Before the rise of search engines this was not terribly relevant, but now - it makes the community look much, much smaller than it really is. I don't have an answer to this problem - the Smalltalk image is unlikely to disappear (and personally, I'm a fan of it). It's just something we have to factor into these kinds of discussions.

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The latest Cincom Smalltalk Digest is up!

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