STIC Conference Teasers: Dart

At the STIC conferences we are focused on Smalltalk, but also like to present topics that are of interest to a Smalltalk audience. In that vein, our Monday keynote features Eric Clayberg of Google talking about the new Dart language. Dart is a new language for building structured web applications, and has been described by Dart lead engineer Lars Bak as having

• an object model from Smalltalk
• compiler optimizations from Self
• types from Strongtalk
• concurrency from Erlang
• syntax from Javascript and C

and has generated a lot of interest and controversy during its short life. Eric describes himself as a "life-long Smalltalker and current Googler" and promises to explain why Dart is "his new second-favorite language".

"One of our key goals with Dart is "toolability", and as the person leading our tooling work, Eric is a key player in the development of Dart. With his extensive Smalltalk background he is a great person to be able to talk to a Smalltalk audience about Dart, the things that are inspired from Smalltalk, and the things it does differently." - Lars Bak, Google Inc.

STIC Conference Teasers: Big POOP

The Smalltalk Industry Conference list of talks is now up. One of the featured keynotes is Sam Adams,
with a talk entitled "Massive Parallelism + Object Oriented Programming = Big POOP". When he talks about massive parallelism, he's talking far beyond what we get today and questioning some of our fundamental assumptions. This is the same work that David Ungar talked about at the Splash conference last fall, which had some nice lines about how we can get much more parallelism if we're not so hung up on getting the right answer...

Here's Sam's abstract:

Object orientation has been very good to programmers. So has Moore’s Law, at least until we recently hit the single thread performance wall. We are now solidly in the age of parallelism, be it multcore, manycore, or massively parallel distributed systems. Both industry and academia have been wrestling with the complexities of this new reality for some years now, and yet no clear-cut solution has emerged to deliver both high performance parallel processing with high programmer productivity for mere mortals.

Since 2008 at IBM Research, David Ungar and I have been using Smalltalk along with a new manycore parallel virtual machine to explore new programming models in this space. In this talk I will share the history of this work, lessons learned, and where we think the future lies for massively parallel object oriented programming in Smalltalk.

Smalltalk Industry Conference List of Talks

The list of talks for this year's Smalltalk Industry Conference is now available. Some very interesting stuff, and the early bird registration ends this Friday. The list for the Smalltalk Directions Symposium and a schedule should be available soon.