I was recently interviewed on both The Linux Outlaws and The Command Line podcasts. While the interviews are general coverage of my life so far, I did manage to sneak a bit of Smalltalk and Seaside content into both of them. I especially made it clear that I've been hacking Smalltalk since 1982, long before Perl was even around.
Apparently, according to James Robertson in 2004, GemStone/S played a significant part to have JP Morgan's Kapital application be a success. But when I look at the much hailed press release in 2009 from Cincom Corporate Marketing (including the detailed PDF), no mention is made at all of GemStone/S. What happened? Did they rewrite the whole thing to talk to Oracle? Not likely! Even Dale Hendrichs of GemStone confirms that as late as 2007, Kapital was still a GemStone/S application.
Next week at OSCON 2009 in San Jose is going to be a very busy week for me. I'm managing the Stonehenge/LinuxFund party on Wednesday night, which includes hanging out at the LinuxFund booth during the day on Wednesday. I'm also appearing at the usual O'Reilly Author meet-and-greet Wednesday evening.
From a comment on a recent post on James Robertson's "Industry Misinterpretations" blog (offered without comment):
"Industry experts estimate that the collective worldwide programmer productivity losses by failing to use Smalltalk-based environments (such as Cincom's VisualWorks) could approach 700,000 dollars per day."
From a recent post by Travis Griggs ....
p := 4 @ 3.
p changeClassTo: (p class copy superclass: p class).
p class methodDictionary at: #negated put: (p class methodDictionary at: #transpose).
p negated
It’s too bad the Io language has an implicit non-overridable “asBoolean” method in the Object base class. That’s a mistake… the same one Ruby and Perl made. Only Smalltalk gets that right. it’d be ok if I could at least override “asBoolean” for my classes as far as ifTrue: and ifFalse: are concerned, but no. Io has its own idea, and that’s that. And I can’t even get it to throw a “must be boolean” error instead. Sigh. So close, and yet so far away.
I'm presenting my "Seaside: Your next web framework" advocacy talk next week in Omaha. Not once, but twice.
Found in a recent Stackoverflow comment:
Trying to get your head around smalltalk without using the IDE is like going to Paris and eating at McDonalds. Sure, you're in Paris, but you aren't really exposing yourself to what it's all about.
