"Light Table" IDE

Chris Granger talks about the "Light Table" IDE prototype. It doesn't remind me of anything :-)

The core interesting idea is presenting code with the values replaced based on evaluation as you're coding. That's pretty neat, but it's not clear to me how that scales up when the list of things you're executing doesn't fit on the screen any more, or when you start having loops that call the same code many times. But interesting ideas.

STIC Conference starts tomorrow

The STIC conference starts tomorrow in Biloxi Mississippi. Unfortunately, I'm not able to be there, due to a family commitment. This will be the first time I've missed the conference in quite a few years. I'm sad not to be able to be there, but it's hard to complain too much under the circumstances. I hope it all goes well, and best wishes to everyone attending. Hope to see you all next year.

If you look in between the building and the tower, roughly in the middle of the wall, then down, that's our place.

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.