Oct 28th 2000.	Camp Smalltalk (OOPSLA 2000) Sunday

Picture from Rick Zaccone <zaccone@bucknell.edu>
Here are some pictures that I took at OOPSLA 2000.
http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~zaccone/OOPSLA-2000/

also some from Ian

http://www-sor.inria.fr/~piumarta/OOPSLA-2000/

and Donald

http://users.erols.com/dmacq/oopsla1.htm

Monday Oct 16th 2000

Tuesday Oct 17th 2000

Wednesday Oct 18th 2000

Thursday Oct 19th 2000

Sunday Oct 15th 2000

It's morning it's really early, in fact the sun isn't up here in Minneapolis. In fact it is so early I'm number one in the line for 'M's. Does that give some clue to the excitement building for OOPSLA and Camp Smalltalk? As I scan the Program guide looking for clues for what's hot, what's new, and what's exciting, what do I see. Well one of our Smalltalk campers is giving a presentation on JWARS, another is talking about GLORP, and another is talking about the ANSI test suite. Yet another is talking about Swazoo and rounding out the impact of Squeak on the community is the NetUnify.com folks talking about their work with Swikies.

Quite an impact the Smalltalk community is having on the show even if we don't get star billing. Who is doing the fun stuff, and didn't we do byte code prediction 20 years ago?

Today I attended a most satisfying workshop.

Think about this there is nothing odd about your local college giving a poetry reading night and studying Robert Burns. Nothing out of the ordinary, you might even attend, no-one needs to know you know nothing about Burns or even poetry.

I understand Ward Cunningham thought "Hey what about programmers they are artists too!". So it fell to Ralph Johnson and Bruce Anderson to host a workshop on Software Aesthetics: Appreciating Code from the Past. Much to our surprise, at the last moment, Richard Gabriel attended.

No we didn't just read the code: we explored, thought and proposed hypothesis and were surprised that some of them didn't work out the way we thought. Hopefully we set the ground work for future workshops so we too could someday have a night out and perhaps listen to a review of Linus Torvalds' coding practices, or would you prefer Robby Burns?

Camp Smalltalk at OOPSLA!

Lo, the campers have taken over a meeting area in the front of the building, actually a round room filed with 5 round tables filling the middle, a fine pair programming setup. Don's Smalltalk balloon floats in the doorway signaling to all this is the place to be, or at least quite different from the main stream.

About 38 people were coding with glee as I stepped in at 5pm. Neat new t-shirts exchanged hands, sorry you must be a camper to get them, cool Squeak buttons were passed out, curious OOOPLA participants looked on, closet Smalltalkers stepped forward and the noise level increased.

Yes, yes you can admit that you too know Smalltalk, no-one is looking, the masses are off learning how to optimize Java and why Java is no longer for the desktop. Perhaps the fun here was seeing how a Java IDE would look two years hence, since over by the window Doug Way was showing us Whisker
a really cool browser metaphor. It seems a very nice replacement for multiple browser windows. Picture if you will one large window with a category view above a class view on the left side. To the right is the class categories, which are stacked. The same applies to methods. A color scheme and matching is used to assist you with visually keeping panes with panes. The pane size alters depending on the sizes of the code. Thus making a great tool to show and explore multiple methods of Smalltalk code. Are we overloaded yet? Well I was, way too much going on, but this is OOSPLA and the energy just sizzled.

Todd Nathan todd@palomablanca.net was telling me that he teaches Squeak to 14 years old in his small town community, he just covers the basic, two days of the online tutorials, then cuts them loose. After a little while he has them interact with a record store owner and has them build him a business system to run the store. They learn everything they need to know to program and build systems for people, and better than us old fossils. Kids are brilliant, even if they know nothing about computer science. Todd feels that programmers are becoming the modern day rock star. Why? One can become a billionaire without a degree, one can get cool toys and earn lots of money, and if you can do the coolest game, well fame follows just look at the founders of Id.

But it was late, dinner was served and we scrambled downstairs for much fun in the evening renewing friendships, eating, enjoying interesting discussions. Is Self coming for Mac OS-X, if you attended OOPSLA and watch a few powerbooks at work, yes you would know. One of the more curious conversations I undertook was with a novice Java programmer, in mid-thought I heard him say did I think it was a fad? Now remember earlier that day at lunch with the world renown Lisp guru, among otherthings Richard had pointed out Lisp usage was as big as Java was now from a percentage viewpoint (quite a few years back of course), and look what happened 10 years later, could the same happen for Java? Would it too disappear? So to the novice Java programmer I replied: "Sure Java is a fad", to which he sputtered in his drink: "No was XP a fad?". Raised eyebrows around, some people just don't understand paradigm shifts when they strike them, perhaps even dead.

At eight some of us retired to the Camp Smalltalk lounge, and found various Smalltalkers and curious onlookers trading war stories and few more dedicated people still hacking on Smalltalk. A few lead by Doug Way were examining the ParagraphEditor in Squeak, brave souls they were, but that might explain some of the problems, many of us fear changing it. A game was afoot to change many of the class variables that handle Undo to instance variables and make a proper object versus 6 odd variables. The code was not 40 years old, only 4 or more, and what does Keyboard do anyway, I assured them that I knew at least on the macintosh that keyboard input wouldn't stop if they deleted the Keyboard class variable. So it started, a small change yet another, but the lateness of the evening approached and we broken before we broke an image. Tomorrow would be more fruitful.