Topic: Smalltalk

In a customer project right now I need to be able to work and evolve code fast, with a relatively complex model. And by fast I mean that I want to cut away as much as possible of the efforts related to persistence. Generally this is what OODBs excel at.

These days I am, as usual, torn between several interesting technical projects.

This day started with some stress, Nicolas and I whipped up the last details of our co-presentation on Jtalk (Nicolas decided to skip Iliad) - and my Eris demo suddenly got b0rken. But I managed to fix it and our presentation was very well received - it was great fun!

Suddenly it is Wednesday and we are already on day three at ESUG - a superb software developer conference focused on Smalltalk. Time flies. Yesterday I mainly hacked together with Nicolas Petton on Jtalk, really fun, unfortunately I missed a few interesting presentations, like Fuel and Bifrost etc.

Each year I try to attend at least one developer conference. Earlier OOPSLA was a given but it lost its appeal quite a few years back and now it is not even called OOPSLA anymore. As a die hard Smalltalker I instead attended the ESUG conference in Brest 2009 and it was easily the most rewarding conference I ever have attended! Missed last year in Barcelona but this year I am going to Edinburgh for a week of Smalltalking.

Two years ago I ended up creating Tirade - a new “file format” for Smalltalkers. Or rather, a way to serialize stuff into a sequence of Smalltalk messages with literals as arguments. I have written a few blog articles about Tirade so I will not go into details in this one.

…is what I did yesterday. It was the Stockholm GTUG group having a loose and laid back meetup in a rather special venue - R1, Sweden’s first nuclear reactor! 27 meters below ground, kinda… funky.

Hmmm, after seeing the Node.js presentation at Dyncon 2011 I couldn’t help installing Nginx and Blackfoot (SimpleCGI) in a Squeak 4.2 image running on the Cog VM to make some performance tests! In fact I started doing that during the presentation. :)

Day one must have ended with lots of beer because people were quite late for day two. 15 minutes late Carl Lerche finally started his Ruby presentation. One thing I found interesting was Ruby Modules vs Monticello extension methods (in some ways I presume this is how Modules are often used - to extend other classes with behavior). Evidently “method extensions” to the class side in Ruby doesn’t work like extensions to the instance side, it does in Smalltalk of course :). Then Carl described ways to still do this, but it looked complex, and also explaining there are lots of “hooks” when messing with the MOP. Is that a good thing? If Rubyists use this a lot, then I presume utter hopeless confusion might occur.

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