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.
Welcome to episode 63 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson and David Buck.
David Buck and I talk about Smalltalk and large scale development, using an interview with Joe Armstrong and Ralph Johnson as a stepping off point. To read or listen to that interview, visit the InfoQ site. There's also a good discussion about this topic in an email thread across the vwnc and Squeak mailing lists; you should check those out as well.
You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.
To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.
If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Troublemaker for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!
If you have feedback, send it to jarober@gmail.com - or visit us on Facebook - you can subscribe in iTunes using this iTunes enabled feed.. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
Welcome to episode 63 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson and David Buck.
David Buck and I talk about Smalltalk and large scale development, using an interview with Joe Armstrong and Ralph Johnson as a stepping off point. To read or listen to that interview, visit the InfoQ site. There's also a good discussion about this topic in an email thread across the vwnc and Squeak mailing lists; you should check those out as well.
You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.
To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.
If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Troublemaker for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!
If you have feedback, send it to jarober@gmail.com - or visit us on Facebook - you can subscribe in iTunes using this iTunes enabled feed.. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at processes in Pharo - specifically, some of the tools and APIs that make working with them easier. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
Welcome to episode 19 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin Haley, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The entire crew is back for the shout outs back to our fans on the Facebook Group. If you asked for one, this is where we answer! We also had a brief discussion about the shouts in the game - including some of the ones that the dragons and greybeards use that players don't have access to.
If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.
Welcome to episode 19 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin Haley, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The entire crew is back for the shout outs back to our fans on the Facebook Group. If you asked for one, this is where we answer! We also had a brief discussion about the shouts in the game - including some of the ones that the dragons and greybeards use that players don't have access to.
If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.
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.
Today's Javascript 4 You looks at the on() function in JQuery. This function is new in JQuery 1.7, and also has a lot of otions; we'll take a few screencasts to cover the highlights. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube.
Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.
To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at starting VA Smalltalk up from the command line. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
You can also watch it on YouTube:
Today we'll take a look at starting VA Smalltalk from the command line. While you would normally start up your development environment from an icon or the start menu on Windows, you might deploy to Linux, or need to set up a Windows "cron" job. The simplest way to start the environment up is to just run the VM:
By default, the VM will look for abt.icx in the current directory, and start that. What if you want to start a different image? Use the -i argument:
Note that we omitted the extension .icx; you need to do that, as the VM will append it itself. There are a lot of command line options you can use to control startup options (memory usage, logging - tons of stuff) - you'll want to examine the docs in detail for that:
Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.
Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.
To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
Welcome to episode 20 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin Haley, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The perk system is one of the coolest parts of Skyrim, and in this episode we start talking about them - focusing on the "warrior" perks. We'll get to the rest of them in future shows. We also touch on the just released 1.4 patch, and the much anticipated Creation Kit. While we discussed the perks, we referred to the awesome Skyrim Perk Calculator site. Check it out before you start your next playthrough!
If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.
Welcome to episode 20 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin Haley, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The perk system is one of the coolest parts of Skyrim, and in this episode we start talking about them - focusing on the "warrior" perks. We'll get to the rest of them in future shows. We also touch on the just released 1.4 patch, and the much anticipated Creation Kit. While we discussed the perks, we referred to the awesome Skyrim Perk Calculator site. Check it out before you start your next playthrough!
If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.
Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at how your application can read the command line that started VA Smalltalk. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
You can also watch it on YouTube:
Today we'll continue looking at the command line for VA Smalltalk, focusing on reading the command line at runtime. Here's a command line with a (presumed) application argument, -k:
VA pays no attention that argument, but what if we want our application to do something with it? Simply do the following:
commandLine := System commandLine.
Try that in a workspace, and inspect the results - you should see something like this:
All arguments and argument names will be strings; you'll need to parse them yourself. It's pretty easy though - you can set up a simple streaming facility for that easily.
Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.
The Skyrim Creation Kit will be available for the PC version this Tuesday, according to a tweet from Bethesda VP of Marketing Pete Hines. It'll be available through Steam under "Tools," for free. As if the ability to generate infinite, free Skyrim content through mods weren't enough, Hines also teased a "special surprise" that would be coming along with it. We'll have to wait until Tuesday to see what that is, but we're guessing dragons. That game would be awesome with some dragons in it.