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OOPSLA 1999 trip report, Wednesday |
On Wednesday morning, which came even earlier, I attended the keynote by James Burke, Science Historian, Author, Television Host/Writer/Producer. One of the more interesting things personally was the word relation joke that linked a bird with a fruit. Squeezing a canary into a gin and tonic had new meaning, since on the previous Sunday I attemped to squeeze a parrot into a cage, which resulted in me having a chunk of flesh removed from my hand. Personally I would not attempt that action again and certainly not with a gin and tonic, well perhaps it would kill the pain.
The highlight of day was the BOF (Birds of a Feather) {also see the 1998 BOF} on Squeak, perhaps it could have been the trial of the Gang Of Four, yes I lost my heart to square brackets, but it was definitely the BOF which started at 8 pm. In this BOF we got to handle a nameless device brought to the meeting by some Squeakers I won't name, why excite the lawyers, that ran a realtime Squeak. Alas the nameless project was canceled by the billionaire owner for personal reasons with another billionaire, certainly not technical and we were informed said device, one of two cost about 5 million to create. We also handled a Zaurus PDA from Sharp, a cool handheld that had a SVGA color screen 600x800 which Yoshiki Ohshima had ported Squeak to, once past some Japanese dialogs one could do Squeak. The device had IR, a optional camera, etc. Very cool, if you want one I can put you in touch with someone who can order one, I believe a half dozen were sold at the meeting on the basis of sheer coolness.
Lex Spoon talked about his work on typing Smalltalk classes and showed how he could create a typed parse tree from a Smalltalk class. The Disney folks introduced Alice and showed us some neat three-D tricks. I understood that Disney introduced a 3D game based on submarines at DisneyWorld's Innovations center this last September. It's based on Squeak and I'd like to hear from anyone who tried it. If you consider it must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build such venue both from just a construction viewpoint let alone the software development effort, then you understand the hidden Squeak World Dominance that is coming.
The highlight of the evening was the presentation Ian Piumarta gave on Jitter 3. The work Ian did was quite amazing, he took the interpreter and uncoupled it from the VM and made it a plugable component. If the external interpreter does not exist then Squeak runs a simple internal interpreter. If the external one does exist then it either executes the bytecode, or optionally decides not to and allows the internal simple interpreter to execute the byte code as a fallback solution. This allows one to implement bytecodes on a opcode by opcode basis. Coupled with his work with a pseudo assembler he expects Squeak could obtain a 2.5-3.0 increase in speed! Which would bring it into the realm of the faster commercial Smalltalks. Really neat, the VM experts there were quite impressed with his clean interface and conceptional grasp of the problem and it seems from their viewpoint a great leap forward in the development of VMs. Squeak is setting the example for VM creation.
The formal part of the meeting ended at 10 pm, then Dr. Ungar showed Self for the macintosh and I and some others ended up talking with Alan Kay about Squeak and other topics like: Where documentation was going? It would seem that Disney will offer up documentation and content via servers. Later with Maloney I suggested Disney could do two types of Servers, one free, and one you pay for to get rights to reuse Disney content. With Alan we discussed many topics, from having a license to program and review boards like the medical profession (a coming issue someday) to the issue of teaching everyone to write software, much like teaching everyone to read and write, to the understanding of music, and the niceness of rounded window corners. Yes that is a Squeak option brought to you by Alan.
Wednesday night might have ended early when we left the Squeak meeting at 12:30 but it didn't, more discussion ensured at the hotel til 2:00AM.
Since the Disney folks were going to talk at the Thursday morning keynote they couldn't show everything