Cincom Smalltalk Digest: December Edition
Welcome to the December 2022 edition of the Cincom Smalltalk™ Digest. In this final edition of the year, we will be summarizing some of the big storylines from this past year, including:
CUSTOMERS and PARTNERS
- The Big News: Two New Product Releases in One Year
- Cincom Holiday Support Coverage
- Use What Budget You Have before It’s Too Late!
- What External Access Frameworks Do You Find Valuable in Cincom Smalltalk? (Email Only)
- A Note from the Support and Engineering Teams
BEGINNERS, FREELANCERS and DEVELOPERS
- How Cincom Smalltalk Can Help You Be a More Productive Software Developer
- Quick-Start Guide to Object-Oriented Programming in Smalltalk
- Three Quick Productivity Tips for Using Cincom Smalltalk
- What Are Pragmas and How Can They Make You More Productive?
CUSTOMERS and PARTNERS
The Big News: Two New Product Releases in One Year
In 2022, the Cincom Smalltalk team was proud to announce two new releases that were made available to customers and partners. In April, we debuted Cincom Smalltalk 9.2 and in October, we released Cincom Smalltalk 9.2.1.
- To view the Cincom Smalltalk 9.2 Data Sheet, click here.
- To learn more about Cincom Smalltalk 9.2, click here.
- To learn more about Cincom Smalltalk 9.2.1, click here.
Over the years, our team continues to improve, enhance and modernize Cincom Smalltalk to deliver a valuable product to all of our Cincom Smalltalk customers, partners and prospects. The work that our team puts in allows users to develop with components from both Cincom® ObjectStudio® and Cincom® VisualWorks® in the same solution, providing more opportunity for success in developing any type of application.
Cincom Holiday Support Coverage
The holidays are almost here and like most of you, many Cincomers celebrate this time with family and friends. Although most of Cincom will be shut down between December 23 through January 2, Cincom Smalltalk Support will still be available for your product issues.
For access:
- Visit Cincom SupportWeb® for immediate support.
- Email HelpNA@cincom.com and EuroTSC@cincom.com to file new support cases. The support staff is on call and will respond to you in a timely fashion.
The Cincom Smalltalk team wishes you the happiest of holidays!
Use What Budget You Have before It’s Too Late!
With only a few weeks left before the end of the calendar year, do you have “use it or lose it” funds that you need to spend before the page turns to next year? As a Cincom Smalltalk partner or customer, here are a few quick ways in which you can spend that budget while improving the value and profitability of your company or application:
- Product Upgrades
- Mentoring
- Troubleshooting
- Performance Enhancements
- Migrations
- Proofs of Concept
Learn details about these solutions and more here: https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/users/services/
Contact the Cincom Smalltalk Product Team right away to get the process started before it’s too late.
A Note from the Support and Engineering Teams
Cincom Smalltalk Support and Engineering value customer feedback on published and pending resolutions. Your input on a pending resolution helps us to include it in future product releases. It also makes it easier to distribute the resolution to the Cincom Smalltalk customer and partner base.
The Cincom Smalltalk team would like to say a heartfelt “thank you!” to everyone who provides this valuable feedback for our ongoing product-improvement efforts.
BEGINNERS, FREELANCERS and DEVELOPERS
Dedicated to new Smalltalkers, freelancers and seasoned developers, this section gives you informative articles and specific Smalltalk examples for learning new skills or enhancing existing skills using Cincom Smalltalk.
How Cincom Smalltalk Can Help You Be a More Productive Software Developer
Umair Haque, the author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and the director of Havas Media Labs, says that productivity is often mislabeled as making stuff cheaper. In reality, Umair correctly states that productivity should be more about “making stuff better.”
To add more, Aytekin Tank, the Entrepreneur Leadership Network VIP at Entrepreneur.com, says the following in his article, “Why Founders Should Focus on Productivity Instead of Efficiency: Productivity is a way to accomplish more of what matters in your business”:
“While efficiency means doing more with less, productivity is about doing more with the same … and it’s a pursuit grounded in quality. After all, who cares whether you cross four extra tasks off your to-do list, if those activities don’t move the needle for your business? An effective morning routine or work schedule should help you to do more of what really matters. That’s why I believe founders and CEOs should focus on productivity, not efficiency.”
The “Pearls of Smalltalk” lists “productivity” as the first pearl. Here are other ways Cincom Smalltalk can help you develop software better:
- Productivity – In studies and comparisons, Cincom Smalltalk is consistently more productive than any other mainstream language.
- Simplicity – The language design is simple, consistent and efficient, allowing users to get more done with less. This means fewer problems and less maintenance for our users. It also means that users can get their arms around more complex problems.
- Pioneering – From Smalltalk’s heritage at the legendary PARC labs, to modern development techniques, Cincom Smalltalk’s technology has and is setting standards. From the graphical user interface to XP/Agile development, people who use our technology are continually making or influencing software development.
- Portability – Cincom Smalltalk is a leader in platform portability, which minimizes risk and protects the user’s development investment while getting the platform flexibility they need for their applications.
- Broad Application Flexibility – Cincom Smalltalk has proven successes with Client, Client/Server, Web Browser, Web Server and Distributed applications.
- Enjoyment – Developers who use our technology get more done and enjoy doing it. Better morale leads to better employee retention.
Quick-Start Guide to Object-Oriented Programming in Smalltalk
Giving you everything you need for a quick start on your Smalltalk programming journey.
Welcome to our quick-start guide into the world of object-oriented programming and Smalltalk. If you have ever asked:
- What is object-oriented programming?
- What are classes and objects in object-oriented programming?
- What does object-oriented programming mean?
- Why do we need object-oriented programming?
- What is Smalltalk?
- What is the Smalltalk programming language used for?
- How long will it take to learn the Smalltalk programming language?
- How is Smalltalk used today?
… this page is here to give answers.
For prospects who are new to object-oriented programming or those who have always wanted to try the magic of Smalltalk but don’t have lots of time to invest, we are introducing a Smalltalk “Quick-Start” guide. This gives prospects what they need to know to get up and running, create and talk to objects, and even build a fun interactive graphic game, in little time!
Below are links to videos that will give users everything they need to get their Smalltalk programming journey started quickly.
- Quick-Start Introduction– Overview of the Quick-Start course
- Object-Oriented Programming Primer– A quick introduction to Object-Oriented Programming
- Smalltalk Language Primer– A brief introduction to the Smalltalk language that gives you the parts you need to start programming in Smalltalk
- Installing and Running Smalltalk– Installing and starting the product
- Running Smalltalk Expressions– Start the product and become familiar with:
- Running Smalltalk expressions
- Creating “immediate” objects
- Sending messages to objects
- Build the Customer Class/Browser Introduction– Use the Smalltalk Browser to:
- Create a package
- Create the Customer class
- Build class and instance methods
- Create a customer instance and send messages to it
- Use the “interactive coding” feature of Smalltalk
- Build the Fifteen Puzzle Application!
Three Quick Productivity Tips for Using Cincom Smalltalk
The Hidden Gems screencast series was created to share shortcuts, tips and techniques that might make it easier for others to use or jumpstart their Cincom Smalltalk usage. In these screencasts, viewers can learn to use various components of Cincom Smalltalk, as well as features that can be used for their own productivity. These “features” are what is considered the “hidden gems.”
Here are three quick tips to make the most productive programming language even more productive!
- Highlight variables
- Expression execution shortcut
- Browser subset contents
Watch this Hidden Gem here: https://youtu.be/76PQVQWlvEw
- The video for Quick Tip #3 can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr4nC8HTYI0
This screencast is part of the Hidden Gems Tools Series, which explores some tools and product features that developers should find useful. In addition, this screencast is also part of the Techniques Series, which shows various techniques from how to accomplish or solve different tasks such as automating image build to creating a custom parser.
Please send comments, questions and suggestions to the Cincom Smalltalk Product Team at CSSTARTeam@cincom.com.
What Are Pragmas and How Can They Make You More Productive?
In this year-end edition of the Digest, we’ve given several examples of how Cincom Smalltalk helps customers, partners and users with productivity in their software development. Another way to be productive with Cincom Smalltalk is through pragmas.
The idea for this screencast came when a Cincom Smalltalk engineer suggested a Hidden Gems on “pragmas,” which was the seed idea. That idea was enhanced with the thought regarding productivity and wanting to show a practical use of pragmas, combined with wanting a faster way to launch browser subsets that are frequently used in development. A “pragma” allows you to annotate a method with declarative metadata.
In this Hidden Gems screencast, we:
- Shared what pragmas are
- Built some productivity tools and made them available in the launcher using pragmas
- Gave some other tool tips (GHPragmaSender, a tool in Contributed Components on our website):
- GHPragmaSender can be found in the Contributed/Heeg directory as well as the public repository.
- GHPragmaSender allows you to search for senders and implementers of pragmas, just as you do with methods.
Watch this Hidden Gem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr4nC8HTYI0
This screencast is part of the Hidden Gems Tools Series, which looks at some tools and product features that developers might find useful. Furthermore, this screencast is part of the Techniques Series, which demonstrates various techniques for accomplishing or solving various tasks ranging from automating image build to creating a custom parser.
Please send comments, questions and suggestions to the Cincom Smalltalk Product Team at CSSTARTeam@cincom.com.