Topic: Smalltalk

Ni is my own little language heavily influenced by Smalltalk but also other sources like Rebol, Forth, Lisp, Self and Nim. Ni is a bit strange, but it’s not academic and really meant to become something useful.

One of the most important aspects in a language is how powerful and easy it is to use its collection/container types. At least that is my feeling coming from Smalltalk where the Collection classes and their rather rich protocols are used extensively and also cover String and Array and much more. If you peek into the current leading open source Smalltalk - Pharo - you can see Collection allSubclasses size evaluate to 78. Of course, lots of those are special subclasses and not for general use, but fact remains that a strong language needs a strong library of good collections.

In my exploration of Nim the turn has come to see how we can use Nim together with Squeak.

In the open source Smalltalk community we have a pretty fast VM these days - its called Cog and is written by the highly gifted and experienced Eliot Miranda who also happens to be a really nice guy! Cog is fast and its also still improving with some more developers joining recently.

I just posted an article comparing some silly benchmarks between Cog Smalltalk and LuaJIT2. Now… let’s take a look at one of the latest “Cool Kids” on the language front, Nimrod - or as it has been renamed - Nim.

It starts off with Cincom, Arden Thomas presenting their roadmap. He had a slide mentioning Jules Verne and I must ask him if he is aware of the influence from the books of Jules Verne - as Dan has explained, the ballon and the island in the classic Smalltalk logo comes from the Mysterious Island book.

Day three blurred a bit for me - lots of mingling and hacking intermixed with some nice presentations, but I missed quite a lot, I admit, like the presentation on new native UI stuff in VisualWorks and the tODE stuff from Dale Henrichs.

Another day in IAE Universite Savoie Mont-Blanc in Annecy.

Here we go! Time for a week of Smalltalking fun in IAE Universite Savoie Mont-Blanc in Annecy.

As a long time Squeak/Pharo (Smalltalk) developer I have accumulated a set of packages that I have written or co-written and that have been published open source for others to use. Since quite a few years SqueakSource has been the natural hosting place, but it has reached the end of the road and it’s high time to move on.