Blame Goodies
I'm going to jump right back into this blogging thing with a new category: Porting Fun. This series of posts are going to cover a few things that I've ported to VisualWorks over time. Keep in mind that none of this is really serious stuff, just me goofing around with VisualWorks.
My original motivation was goodies, hence the title. The goodies directory (now called contributed) has always contained some cool things. That is where one might find the original Refactoring Browser, HotDraw, CoolImage or neat hacks like Gremlin. I'm fairly certain this tradition of having goodies with the distribution has its origins with the original distribution of Smalltalk-80 with things like toothpaste.st.
Sometime around the time we were releasing VisualWorks 5i.1, I felt motivated to add some goodies that were a little less serious. I decided it would be easier to find older code and port it to a newer version of VisualWorks, rather than actually write something from scratch. This is the ultimate re-use of code, or a great example of me being lazy.
I dug around in the UIUC Smalltalk archive and found things like Reversi, WinMine and Castle Microsloth. With minimal effort I was able to get them into shape for VisualWorks 5i.x. We also had another game, Golden Monkey that was created by someone who was an instructor from the ParcPlace days. You should be able to find all of these in the Cincom Smalltalk public repository and the contributed directories.
Once I had mined the archive for what I thought was long-hanging fruit, I was again stuck with wanting something else to port. After some surfing the web, I found something that looked easy to to port. I'll leave that story for the next post.
