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Camp Smalltalk (OOPSLA 2000) Monday |
Sunday Oct 15th 2000
Monday Oct 17th
What is morning? Well it's not time for Smalltalkers to get up. By 8:30, why am I up?, there was five of us nibbling on breakfast snacks and drinking coffee. Susan Johnson was telling us about how she was using Smalltalk to build application UI which became the applications since the C++ candidates took too long to complete and the Java stuff was too slow. Oh these images are involved in the creation process for pacemakers a very interesting use of Smalltalk.
By 9:15 the number of campers had risen to 16 people, and I was handing out versions of 2.8.4 of the macintosh VM to interested beta testers via IR connections. Beside me Don Roberts and John Brant were showing off the latest version of the Refractory Browser to a small group of individuals. They went on to explain the re-write tool a part of the magical Refactory Browser.
Joseph Pelrine was hard at work on his presentation, the crowd of smalltalkers was perhaps comforting, he mentioned that Camp Smalltalk was coming to Europe, next year at ESUG www.esug.org. Visit their web site and see the links to the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland Smalltalk groups
Joseph Bacanskas and Rob where working on XML and were later joined by Enoch who showed them his newly purchased XML and SOAP book. Joesph was explain to Rob how Gemstone worked.
By 9.45am 22 people were crowded around the tables working with cool user interace and someone remarked the codefest java folks were busy struggling with telnet sessions.
At 10 we got some white boards and I was helping Enoch with some Socket stuff. Then Steve Pair from Swiki.net dropped by to talk to me about Sockets and Squeak and their work on extending Sockets for Windows NT, and yes we understand the need to consolidate the Socket layer between Squeak version.
David Faber talked to me about Swazoo and sockets. The team was working on some DNS problems and pending SSL work. Les Tyrrell was hacking the Oasis system, a system he has spent many years writing, over in the corner Travis Griggs was running SUnit tests and the hecklers were crowded around, mostly admiring the Redness of it, Travis was working on Measurement Units and ignoring the crowd. Alan Knight and Eliot were working on something called chickeneyes. Humor at OOPSLA, you bet. Frantic motions were made to grab copies of this software and port to all known Smalltalk dialects.
I spent a few minutes talking to a rep from CinCom Canada about Smalltalk in Canada, and what Cincom Canada was doing. A gentleman from NY joined us and was interested in contributing some code to work that Cincom was doing. Cincom I understand was actively working issues around code contribution and it seems an announcement will be pending to answer some of the questions raised at Camp Smalltalk (CS2) in Annapolis. The conversion quickly dissolved into a discussion of asp, cgi and specialized protocols.
The Swazoo folks were hard at work and demonstrating their work.
Bob Hartwig was working on the Refactory Browser in Squeak. About 75% there for the GUI, slow tedious work but required by the community. Peter Hatch across the table was integrating it in to VisualWorks 5I, yet another slowly progressing project.
In the afternoon I attended most of the only 'official' Smalltalk tutorial. Advanced eXtreme Programming Testing Techniques in Smalltalk, given by Joseph Pelrine, and Sames.
Joseph said he was here to share about the arrows in his back. Sames of course has implemented SUnits in every dialect of Smalltalk in the known university, except QKS baring some issues about getting a macintosh to port with. Yes the book Mastering Envy/Developer IS available and you can order it here, or perhaps this Squeak book by Mark Guzdial
A few notes from the early part of Joseph's talk:
"SUnit is not enough, lots of input and a rewrite to handle extensions earlier this year"
"Should you write tests for every accessors? No you only write tests for things that will break. There is an argument for doing the accessors, but be serious this takes too much time."
"For task 'A' what is simplest thing that could possibly work. This led me to late night talks with Kent Beck. The journey is the answer. Be self critical, be honest, does it work? "
And the rest of the afternoon was spent in discussion of Smalltalk and testing, for more information please contact the presenters, since this was a paid for copyrighted presentation and I shouldn't steal their thunder.
After the break I departed to run an errand and passed by the codefest and note the hardworking 10 or so Java programmers then upstairs to see what the 34 odd happy Campers were upto. By 5:00 this had ballooned to 48 campers surrounding 19 or more computers. Travis dropped by suffering from way too much programming, mumbling about the lack of stream primitives in VisualAge Smalltalk. So you want to read a nibble, well you can't do that from here. So we replied just write your own this is Smalltalk after all.
Eliot with animated hand motion was explaining some of the interesting things within the VM to a number of intent looking campers. A member of the VisualAge Smalltalk team was discussing issues at large with the numerous VisualAge Smalltalkers in the crowd. Did I say it was crowded yet? And no food present, most amazing.
Over in the corner Ian and various members of SqC had arrived. Ian was showing the mysteries of Jitter 3. Various people, the authors of the other Squeak book were discussing a possible dinner and looking for a sponsor but Alan Kay wasn't present and the junior Disney member didn't think he'd be able to fund such a venture. This book is at …………… it's most impressive, but only available in PDF format, most of the SqC group straggled in and the party really started.
I introduced Enoch to George Bossworth and learned the history of Enoch's involvement with VSE and enough to discovered that George was deeply involved in the Microsoft SOAP experience. So tremendous information flew and names were exchanged and discussion continued.
Peter Hatch was messing with his Linux box, sometimes things just don't work out… Various OOPLSA attendees moved about watching the fascinating things you could do with Smalltalk. It seemed the buzz of interest was here within the Smalltalk Camp. It's 5:15 and sessions are over and the room is filled with 56 campers and plans are a foot to visit the reception and find some food, so off we go.
We departed to the Hilton for the poster session, I'm sorry to report even if the food was at the Hilton it did NOT match the food at the 98 OOPSLA in Vancouver. Between looking at the interesting posters and talking to various people I had the good fortune to run into David Ungar, Dan Ingalls, and George Bossworth who were gathered about listening to George and David exchange viewpoints on ".NET" A most facinating discussion by two of the most interesting VM creators of the last century who now work for opposing companies, and responsible for various Smalltalk VM, and now contributing to oposing VMs. It's interesting that both of them now provide VM expertist at the highest levels but are firmly entrenched within the Smalltalk viewpoint.
The evening progressed to a so called English bar, and the Frenchmen and Canadians among us agreed the Guiness was NOT Guiness and discussion ranged from G4's to Voodoo 5's to how do childeren learn, what is the digital divide and a better understanding of our visions were reached…