Cincom Smalltalk Stuff

I just came back earlier this week from the Smalltalks 2008 conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is just the second year of the conference, and I was very impressed, despite not really understanding very much. Not speaking Spanish is a bit of a handicap when that's the predominant language for the talks. Up here in Canada we don't get Spanish in school - we get French. That's helpful - between French and English, you can guess quite a few Spanish words. But it's not like knowing the language. But what was surprising to me was how much it's possible to get out of a talk where you don't understand either the slides or the talking. Hmmm - now he's making a joke about Microsoft and Web Services... now he's saying this is implemented in Dolphin and too bad that Dolphin's dying...
The SqueakDBX presentation. Even without knowing Spanish, you get the idea. Mariano Peck, Esteban M. Lorenzano and Germán F. Palacios.

And there were some very interesting talks. The prize winner was a very impressive Commodore 64 emulator by Gabriel Honoré. It's technically interesting because it reifies many, many aspects of the underlying hardware (at one point it wasn't working, and it was because he'd forgotten to virtually plug it in - it needed a "powerSupply turnOn"). And it was just really cool to watch the graphics and hear the bleeps and bloops just like a real Commodore 64. I'm told by former C64 owners that when you do a "hardware" reset the screen flickers just the right way you'd expect. And the performance was adequate to run at full speed on a reasonable modern laptop.

But there were a lot of other interesting talks too. I won't go through them all, but some of the ones I particularly enjoyed included some work on medical expert systems, another experiment in reworking the collection hierarchy to use traits, the SqueakDBX database driver project, an "IDE" written in Dolphin to ease the pain of a huge .NET and Web Services project, SqueakNOS (Squeak running directly on the hardware), and a tutorial on soccer playing robots. This last one deserves a bit more explanation. Apparently this is a fairly organized activity, with actual robot soccer leagues (e.g. http://www.fira.net ) Unfortunately, they didn't have real robots here, just simulators. But it was still pretty interesting to watch.

I loved the conference logo - Knights of the Square Brackets meets Bandoleon (a type of accordion). Here it's shown on the screen during Hernán Wilkinson's introductory talk.

Unfortunately, this was a real lightning trip for me. I arrived Wednesday morning after an overnight flight, with the conference running Tuesday-Saturday, and then I flew back Sunday night. This didn't leave a lot of time to explore Buenos Aires, but I did get some opportunity to walk around the city and some time talking to people at the conference We had a social evening at a restaurant, served the traditional Argentinian dish of Asado - the short summary of that is lots and lots of barbequed meat. The following evening I had dinner (Asado) with the group doing the SqueakDBX project, talking about how to make Glorp use that driver cleanly without interfering with the other, incompatible drivers in Squeak. And on Sunday, the organizers took a few of us out to Tigre, by a river delta north of the city, and we rowed out to an island for a barbeque (guess what). So lots and lots of Asado, although a bit different each time. Overall, it was a great trip, and many thanks to everyone involved. I had a wonderful time throughout, and will definitely try to get back to Argentina again, and make a proper stay of it.
(nearest to furthest) James Foster (Gemstone), Victor Koosh and Leandro Caniglia (Caesar Systems) and Andres Valloud (Cincom) taking us to the airport.