If you missed StS 2004, then check out the presentations page at Why Smalltalk. Make sure to thank Alan Knight, the technical coordinator for the show - he's the one who badgered all of us who presented to get our slides in. Jason Jones gets kudos as well for getting the material online.

Niall has taken his usually copious notes for StS and sent me a PDF file - read his report here.

If you attended StS 2004, then you should fill out our comment survey and let us know how it went. The feedback will help us plan a better event next year - thanks!

We are going to have a survey up shortly asking for feedback on this year's show - I'll post a link to it as soon as we get it finalized. In the meantime, we are starting to discuss where to have next year's show. Nothing's finalized about that yet - we are in preliminary discussions at this point. We would like to make an earlier announcement than we did this time around, so as to let people make plans earlier. Any feedback from the community as to places that would attract/repel you from StS 2005 would be great - let us know now.

Here's a press release STIC just dropped:

Seattle Hosts Successful Smalltalk Solutions

Cary, North Carolina, May 14, 2004 -- The Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC) is happy to announce that this year's Smalltalk Solutions in beautiful Seattle was a rousing success. Smalltalkers of all ages and abilities from throughout the world descended upon the Seattle conference to experience the rich variety of talks and presentations that were offered. The hotel buzzed with conversation as colleagues both old and new traded ideas, shared their experiences and debated throughout the three-day conference. The Council would like to thank all the presenters and attendees who helped make the show one of the best ever.

The presentations, tutorials, and BOF's were a big hit and offered a little something for everyone at the show. Attendees selected from a wealth of choices from pension-plan management and emergency-services dispatch to internet syndication and garbage collection. The talks generated much interest among the conference-goers with many conversations making their way out of the classrooms to the exhibit hall where others could enjoy and join in.

It was standing room only when the conference keynote speakers took the floor. George Bosworth of Microsoft discussed Smalltalk and CLR virtual machines. Former Hotspot architect Lars Bak discussed Smalltalk for very small embedded devices. And Seaside inventor Avi Bryant talked about Smalltalk's role in redefining web development. STIC would like to publicly thank the keynote speakers for the wonderful job they did in informing and enlightening the conference on such exciting topics.

About STIC

The Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC) is a nonprofit trade association whose goal is to promote awareness and increase demand for Smalltalk. STIC was reorganized in 2002 by Cincom, GemStone, IBM and Knowledge Systems Corporation, creating a cohesive Smalltalk community where information, technical issues, new ideas and concerns are openly discussed to benefit businesses as well as the software industry. STIC's membership consists of users, service providers and vendors of Smalltalk tools, components, databases and services. For more information on STIC, please visit www.stic.org

Contact:
Jason Jones
Smalltalk Industry Council
919.789.8549 x.21

Stay tuned for news about next year's show - if you have suggestions for a location, let us know now

John McIntosh's StS 2004 notes start here on the Camp Smalltalk Wiki - links to successive reports are at the bottom of each entry. I am still expecting more notes, and I'll post them or link to them as I get them. Enjoy!

It's been a great show - My talk went well this morning, and I received some very nice feedback - thanks to all for the great questions! It's been good to finally meet the withStyle team face to face - I look forward to seeing the lot of you in Australia, even if I have some trepidation about the vegemite you provided :) It was a great show, and I hope we have as great a time next year.

Brian Rice talks about Slate. Generally works in language research - very inspired by Self - working with Lee Salzman (not here) - designing Slate with him. Looking for flexibility and minimalism. Want to do what Squeak does, but better. Slate is free, under the MIT license. Want to use a lot of the good ideas in Smalltalk, and bring them together. Admits that the number of unique new ideas in Slate is small. Implemented first cut using Lisp. Why a new Smalltalk? Self and Strongtalk promised change, but we ended up with Java instead. The existing ST vendors have customer bases to deal with. Squeak is free and malleable, but has too many small issues - new designs can't tackle all of them. Really wanted to push together the right set of ideas in one place.

Influenced by Self and Strongtalk. Also by CLOS and Dylan. Wanted to combine best ideas from these disparate systems in one place. Slate development started in 2002. Self was not practical - big demo. Squeak was moving in too many directions, in their opinion. Slate the language is based on objects with slots, prototype based language. methods are blocks that close over their arguments, and have a syntax signature that activates them. Smalltalk is single dispatch - Slate is multi-dispatch. Slate specifically allows for object-specific behavior and state, and multi-argument dispatch. They call this combo "PMD".

All arguments are receivers and they play different roles. Objects do not relate to methods in the same way they do to their slots. methods are cooperatively held between many objects. No self/super keywords - not reserved. lookup is accomplished through messages to the context

Method lookup is performed in cooperation with the arguments - dictionary is searched depth first, left to right, methods ordered by their "distance" from the arguments. The distance is "deterministic" and the "closest" method applies. Optimization needed to be done early as a result.

Slate started with Self's inheritance model, using special slots to store delegates. Shared "traits" contain behavior, not state. This was found to be too dynamic. a pattern - does not distinguish enough. Now looking at new models - Looking more closely at what Self did with descriptors. Looking at Squeak traits for ideas.

Wanted to keep the syntax as close to Smalltalk as they could. So what's it look like?

collections 
	addPrototype: #NoDuplicatesCollection
	derivedFrom: ExtensibleCollection.

nd@(NoDuplicatesCollection traits) add: obj
[
	nd include: obj
].

So it looks like Smalltalk, but oriented in a prototype based direction. Macro-methods - syntax parse trees are an object medium for communication. can annotate these with type info or declarations, or describe a pattern that the compiler van recognize and optimize on. There are tools being built for this.

Summary - this is very early development work - the VM has only just been done - it's a work in progress. Plan is to go VM-less and bootstrap.