Old Blog on Roads Less Taken

Skype interview with Dan Ingalls

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 08:49:54 +0000

Before the summer I had the opportunity to do a Skype interview with Dan Ingalls , the “Guido/Larry/Linus” of Smalltalk.

The interview was part of a guest lecture I did at DSV for the DYPL course (dynamic programming languages) held by Beatrice Akerblom. In the end I only used a smaller quote because most of the topics in the interview ended up being more interesting to “true believers” than to Smalltalk newcomers.

Making a Skype interview...

Fri, 07 May 2010 14:00:08 +0000

I got the opportunity to make a Skype interview with Dan Ingalls , so I decided to try to record it. Had no idea it was not as easy as a “press record”-button. I am on Ubuntu, Karmic Koala. First of all I had serious trouble getting proper sound working with Skype, I ended up following the HOWTO in order to install Skype 2.1 beta - which uses PulseAudio ONLY. That took care of that issue, after a bit of fiddling in the “Preferences” dialog you get when right-clicking on your volume applet :)

Joe is wrong

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:12:06 +0000

I just read Joe Armstrong’s old “Why OO sucks” article , Joe Armstrong being the inventor of Erlang . Granted, the article is from year 2000 I think, so perhaps I should cut him some slack… nah! :)

First of all - no, I haven’t programmed in Erlang (yet), but quite a lot of other programming languages. My favorite language is the grand father OO language - Smalltalk . So sure, I am biased in favor of OO.

Tirade, first trivial use

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:43:55 +0000

Last night I started hooking Tirade into Deltas. Quick background: Deltas is “Changesets for the 21st century”, or in other words an intelligent patch system under development for Squeak. Tirade is a Smalltalk/Squeak centric “JSON”-kinda-thingy. I made Tirade in order to get a nice file format for Deltas. Just wanted to share how the first trivial code looks, and thus illustrate simple use of Tirade.

I have a DSDelta (a Delta being almost like a ChangeSet). It consists of some metadata (a UUID, a Dictionary of properties and a TimeStamp) and a DSChangeSequence (which holds the actual DSChange instances). As a first shot I only implemented the metadata bit. So step by step:

Tirade, part 2

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:34:07 +0000

In an article recently I described Tirade - a new generic “file format” for Smalltalk/Squeak, or actually a sub language! Since that article I have refined Tirade a bit. Tirade consists today of 4 classes (parser, reader, writer, recorder) totalling about 500 lines of code, excluding tests. Tests are green in 3.10.2, pharo-10231, 3.9, 3.8 and 3.7. It does turn red in 3.6 due to old initialize behavior, some missing methods etc, probably easily fixed if anyone cares. There are no dependencies on other packages. Compared to using the old Compiler»evaluate: it is about 5-7 times faster.

Tirade, a file format for Smalltalkers

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:24:07 +0000

In my revived work on Deltastreams in Squeak I ended up facing the choice of native file format for Deltas. Matthew has made an advanced format called InterleavedChangeset which manages to squeeze a binary representation of a Delta into a Changeset file (which is in Smalltalk chunk format). An impressive feat, and it has the advantage of being backwards compatible in the sense that a Delta in this format can be filed in as a plain old Changeset into an old Squeak image.