[|] Less is More

Apple’s announcement of the new iPad was of interest to me. 

There were mentions of Alan Kay (father of Smalltalk) and the iPad’s similarities to the dynabook.  The idea of the dynabook must seem pretty unimpressive by todays standards, but the dynabook idea was introduced in 1969 – put in chronological context I always find that extremely impressive.  And of course Smalltalk was created as the language to help the dynabook achieve its lofty goals.  Smalltalk we know has been a massive influence on modern computing.

What is a bit disappointing is the amount of criticism the iPad has received.  I understand it I think – The bar was set so high with expectations and the success of the iPhone and iPod touch, that they would have needed to do something incredibly innovative in order to not get a collective yawn. 

So in most ways the iPad is a big iPod touch – that’s a good thing I think.  I have an iPod Touch, and for around the office or home, I like it even better than my iPhone, because of its slimmer form factor.  A larger iTouch would be ideal for reading ebooks or online papers, reading email, etc – the touch is a bit small for extensive reading.  I like that is was not priced too high, making it available to more folks.    For browsing web pages with a touch interface in a portable device, it seems best in class. 

As my blog title states “Less is More” and I think the iPad meets this criteria spot on. The iPAd was an obvious and smart first release, that can be built on and improved with more experience and feedback with the device.

Smalltalk in Seattle!

Come join us for a half day Smalltalk conference/briefing in Seattle.

January 21: Seattle, Washington

If you are not near Seattle, check out our other dates:

• January 26: Toronto, Ontario
• January 28: Baltimore/Washington

Questions?

Happy New Year!

Prior to Christmas, the final releases of ObjectStudio 8.2 and VisualWorks 7.7 went to distribution.

Customers should begin receiving these imminently.

I think you will find great value in the new features and refinements to the development environment.

Happy Smalltalk!

- Arden Thomas

Windows 7

I preordered Windows 7 back in the spring, and installed it two weekends ago, on my main home machine.

Impressions: Simpler, lighter, faster, better.

I think someone at Microsoft did their homework on "User Experience".  Navigating is much faster and easier.  Some of the clever capabilities I find very useful.

For example; if you slide a window to the far left, it will resize to the left half of your screen. Ditto the right.  So you can slide, left and right, windows you want to compare, drag and drop with, or just have side by side, very easily.  I like it.

Maybe even more significantly is that I installed Windows 7 64 bit. 

For Windows XP I didn't even consider 64 bit (wisely); for Vista, after looking at the programs I used that would not run on Vista 64, I declined it, now for Windows 7 the vast majority of applications I use all work on (or will work on soon) Windows 7 64 bit.   Now at least I have access to the full 4gb of memory installed on my machine.  (Win32 can address 3gb max).

(A tip for Windows7 users - check out Firefox 3.6b1.  Excellent Win7 integration!  

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/6128/the-illustrated-guide-to-the-new-firefox-3.6-windows-7-integration/ )

Of course, I wanted to make sure that our Smalltalk products would work on this prominent OS.  So far, I installed VisualWorks (with some tweaks for admin rights - we are making some minor changes to the installation process for VW 7.7 to make it smoother).

It worked great!  VisualWorks 7.7 has many refinements to the browsers, editors and tools.  It had been a bit since I had done any coding, but I felt immediately comfortable. 

So far:  Win7 & VW7.7 - a great pair!

More soon:  ObjectStudio is on track for Windows7 certification, and will install nicely with its native .msi installer

-        Arden

Lukas Renggli announced a new Seaside book at ESUG, free and online :

Dynamic Web Development with Seaside

I recommend checking it out!                

ESUG 2009

I just returned from ESUG 2009, which was held in Brest France this year. This is one of the best conferences, in my opinion. 

My favorite part of it is the innovation awards, where developers show off innovative things developed in Smalltalk.   

The winner this year was Retrobjects by Gabriel Eduardo Honoré.   This project emulates two gaming platforms (Commodore 64 and Nintendo NES) by emulating them, chip by chip!  A lot of detailed work and understanding went into this... the result?  It plays the original games faithfully!  It was pointed out that it is significant, that the emulator runs at 100% of the original hardware speed.  Amazing.

Gabriel chose Smalltalk for the ability to faithfully model in OO, and VisualWorks for its performance.

Very, very impressive, and my congratulations to Gabriel! Retrobject Powerpoint presentation

Tetris?  Yes Tetris!

It had been awhile since I had actually picked up my own product and really immersed myself in a coding project.  Recently my Tivo had recorded a short history of the game of Tetris (quite interesting), and this piqued my interest ..... why not develop a game of Tetris? (for fun and personal use of course)  Oh, I know, its' been done;  it has even been used as an example for design in Smalltalk for years, and there is even an example that ships with the product  .... So I set a few ground rules.

·       Don't look at existing implementations (no cheating, eyes on your own monitor! ;-) )

·       Make it simple, less is more is a theme here

·       Use a recent VisualWorks 7.7 beta to develop in, and experience our new changes to the environment. No enhancements, just the stock, out of the box environment.

The result?  Wow!  The fast time to get something working reaffirmed to me the power of Smalltalk, and the continued refinement in our environments.  Some notes:

·       Within half an hour I had a grid, a colored tetris piece (stick) displayed on the grid, and the stick dropping down the grid. Then I worked on:

o   moving the active piece left and right

o   recognizing when the activePiece could drop no further, and making its cells static in the grid

o   pause and resume when pressing the escape key

o    rotation of the object when pressing the up arrow

o   Dropping the activePiece when pressing the down arrow

Within a relaxed two hours I had the basic functionality complete, and continued to add remaining pieces, experiment with the nature and direction of rotation, and play the game.

I had a total of a dozen classes; eight of them were the seven pieces (shapes) and an abstract superclass. The remaining four: TetrisApp, TetrisModel, TetrisView, GridCell. 

Some observations:

There is VERY little code.  There are half a dozen to a dozen methods in the major classes, and most of those are one-liners.  The more complex methods were ones for reporting which cells a piece occupied for its current orientation, and even most of those were a half dozen or less lines of code.

The environment, Wow!  The improvements our tools team have continued to put in to our environment pleasantly surprised me.  How could I be surprised?  I frequently load and run our beta versions of the product, and some changes are very obvious. But until you sit down and really use it, some changes may be hard to appreciate.  Lots of little refinements that make the experience more pleasant and productive abound.  The browser just conveys more useful information than ever before. Many of the changes are new for 7.7, and some are refinements from recent versions.  Either way, the development experience has made big strides in recent years, and recent months.

There are still some minor errors in the behavior of the application, which I may leave in there for instructional reasons.  There are many, many improvements and refinement that can be made.  I will publish this at some time, if you want to try it out, shoot me an email at: athomas@cincom.com

I mentioned in an earlier post that we would be taking our message on the road, and visiting some cities in a seminar series.  The first will be in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on April 29^th. 

See more information here.  Hope to see you there!

Why learn Smalltalk?

First it is a great language to work in, but you can make that determination yourself.

Second, even if you dont plan to work in Smalltalk, learning it will make you a better OO programmer in ANY language.

One of the best ways to learn Smalltalk is to take a class.

I want to reiterate some good information from James post.

The Georg Heeg company is running a public Smalltalk class in Koethen, Germany, May 4-8. Interested? Head to their website and contact them.

Leveraging Multi-Core Computers redux

A while back you may remember my series of experiments and observations with an experimental framework that allows you to take advantage of multi-core computers with your Smalltalk applications.  It really comes down to approaches to concurrency.  The goals I want us to attain in an approach are:

·         Keep it Smalltalk simple

·         Maximum gain with minimum pain

The framework offered allows easy implementation of large grained concurrent processes, which can give big advantages (where it fits of course), can be done fairly simply, and usually steers clear of the worst issues that can occur when using concurrency.

Threading is a alternative approach, which can be effective, but can also bring out the worst and most difficult issues in concurrency.

A friend sent me a links to some articles of interest, and that support this direction, one from the Intel developer network, and another from IEEE Computer.

If you would like to learn more about our approach to leveraging multi-core in Smalltalk, please contact us.

Do you know someone looking to learn Smalltalk, or who wants to lean the right way to do Object-Oriented?

Here are some links you can send them, and a three step program to a successful start!

Smalltalk - VisualWorks

VisualWorks is a modern descendent of the revolutionary work done at PARC, and a fantastic way to start learning, or building, professional applications.

First go to  Cincom Smalltalk,  click on downloads, and request a VisualWorks non-commercial CD be sent to you.  Or fill out the forms and download it.

Videos

Next, click on the "Developer's Gallery"  icon, choose the "Cincom Smalltalk Videos"  link followed by "Introduction to the Product Videos"

Books

Here are some links to free PDF versions of published books.  They can be bought on Amazon if a hardcopy is desired.

The nice thing about these books is that they use VisualWorks as the example Smalltalk, so it makes it much easier to get started. A thank you to Stephane Ducasse, for making these available.

Smalltalk by Example: the Developer's GuideAlex Sharp, McGraw Hill Text; ISBN: 0079130364

The Art and Science of Smalltalk, by Simon Lewis, Prentice-Hall 

Smalltalk An Introduction to Application Development using VisualWorks, Trevor Hopkins and Bernard Horan, Pearson Education


There are many more resources and lots of information available, from numerous blogs, weekly podcasts (avail at iTunes and other sources), a very active Smalltalk community, and other Smalltalk environments!  (ObjectStudio8, Web Velocity).

Visit Cincom Smalltalk

 

Musings;  then and now ...

First, a Happy New Year to all!

A couple of years after I had started with ParcPlace Systems (back in the early 1990's), I had entertained the notion of an investment strategy comprised of investing in the public companies who were using VisualWorks (or even any flavor of Smalltalk, but I was an SE advocating VisualWorks at the time).  It would have done really, really well.  It's just as fun to ponder why this was;  was it because the companies were astute and competent (noted by their choice in language) and therefore did well?  Or was it because of the productivity of the language itself that let them rise above their competitors?  Random luck?  There is no way of knowing for sure; probably some combination of factors, but it makes for an interesting discussion.

Fast forward to recent times ... with all the chaos in the credit and financial markets impacting the economy and companies directly, is there any correlation with companies using Smalltalk?  Although somewhat anecdotal, the companies in the banking and financial sector who are using VisualWorks and ObjectStudio (Cincom's major Smalltalk products) seemed to have fared far better than those who don't.   A major issue for many firms was there risk & exposure to certain financial instruments.  One company, fairly well known to the Smalltalk community, uses our products specifically to manage risk, and appears to be doing rather well compared to their peers.

I like this as an example of why folks should consider using our Smalltalk products.  In this case the advantage realized is probably a combination of its productivity, but especially that it lets you get your arms around more difficult problems, more effectively than about anything else.