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.

Bugs are like prime numbers...

"Bugs are like prime numbers. You can never really find the last one. But after the first billion or so, they start to thin out a little bit..." - Brian Foote

STIC submission deadlines coming soon

The Smalltalk Industry Conference 2012 is coming up March 19-21, and submission deadlines are coming up sooner.

This year there are two parts to the conference, so there could be some confusion.

- Smalltalk Industry Conference: This is the traditional Smalltalk Solutions program. To submit, you just need summary information for the talk. The presentations are, at least sometimes, recorded, but there aren't published papers. The deadline for those submissions is VERY SOON - December 15th. Call for participation is here.

- Smalltalk Directions: This is the academic part of the conference, new this year. It accepts academic papers, which will be refereed and a selection of which will be submitted to the Journal of Object Technology. The deadline for those submissions is January 6th, 2012. The call for participation is here.

Some nice words for Smalltalk

As part of a comment on an earlier post, Bob Calco writes some nice things about Smalltalk...

Now I'm getting into Smalltalk 'for real' and finding that the OO-ness of it is not even the main thing I find compelling: it's the live-ness of it. It's just easier to think about the abstractions 'in the present' as it were. 

I think Smalltalk takes the idea of live objects to such a level of sophistication that most people can't quite grok the Platonic Forms of domain modelling that swirl around the mind of an accomplished Smalltalk developer. 

and also

But folks who have come to think OO is more buzzword than reality could not possibly have tried Smalltalk, not 'for real,' let alone tried to get good at it. It's not just a language or even a platform but a way of thinking about reduction of a problem to its essence, as this article makes clear. 

I did leave out the bit in the middle where he has some thoughts for improvements like pattern matching, but they're at the bottom of the article. For myself I've never quite seen pattern matching as an especially valuable feature. To my mind the biggest gain is that it's a terse way of extracting out elements of a list -either a variable size list of arguments, or if you're in a language where linked lists are the primary data structure, being passed a list and automatically having it expressed as two variables represent first and rest. Other than that it just seems like syntactic sugar for a case statement. But maybe I'm missing something.

Dave Ungar on Massive Parallelism

Another one of the Microsoft Channel 9 videos from the Splash conference. This features Dave Ungar talking about Self and his current work with massive parallelism, using Smalltalk and C++, and how we can get our answers much much faster if we're not quite so hung up on them having to be exactly right...