More on Smalltalk
Posted by Damien Pollet Sun, 01 Jul 2007 14:58:29 GMT
As a follow-up on my previous post on Smalltalk blogs, Giovanni blogs on Squeak and Seaside, and recently started to write posts in English.
Politics and the game of Go
Posted by Damien Pollet Fri, 04 May 2007 19:13:12 GMT
Agoravox, a french « citizen journalism » initiative, published a seriously fun article showing the analogy between the french elections and the game of Go (in French, sorry).
The analogy could probably work for any field where strategy and tactics come into play, and it’s rather funny to see it map so well to the recent events. However, it breaks at one point… at the end of a game of Go, the game result doesn’t matter so much because both players have played a nice game, and won experience and respect.
In our case, let’s hope the chuban was actually good and the yose turns towards the public interest…
Collaborative development
Posted by Damien Pollet Mon, 23 Apr 2007 22:39:56 GMT
Panic and TheCodingMonkeys just announced Coda and the Subetha engine.
We are proud that this kind of collaboration now crosses application borders to the benefit of all Coda and SubEthaEdit users.
Great. I just find it a little funny that the infrastructure of these collaborative tools is developed in a non-collaborative way…
Thankfully we have Gobby, an open-source equivalent to Subetha that has been crossing platform and even implementation borders for some time now.
Actiontastic will be free and open source
Posted by Damien Pollet Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:09:45 GMT
Actiontastic is a cool GTD application by Jon Crosby. Until now we were teased by expiring beta releases, but Jon decided to open-source it!
Opening up this project for community participation is the best possible thing that I can think of doing for its future. Great things are on the horizon for that sweet intersection of the web and the desktop. I would rather discuss them openly and collaborate with other like-minded people than hide any of the details just to make another $29 shareware sale. I am not opposed to the idea of shareware in general and have purchased quite a bit of it myself over the past year. It’s just that shareware isn’t the right path for Actiontastic.
I really like this approach of free, tweakable, open-source software, associated with a paying hosted service (like Actionatr) for those who want all the benefits without bothering themselves with maintaining infrastructure.
The Nokia N800 from a Newton perspective
Posted by Damien Pollet Wed, 24 Jan 2007 01:05:50 GMT
Here is a nice comparison of Nokia’s N800 with Apple’s Newton. Kinda summarizes where to start from to get the iPhone of my dreams.
Update: N800 dissected, Meizu M8 looks like an iPhone.
On buzzwords and jargon
Posted by Damien Pollet Mon, 27 Nov 2006 20:31:38 GMT
Nice post on the usefulness of jargon (via Martin Fowler). At work we recently had this dicussion with Kris Gybels, who is invited at our lab this month, and works on aspect-oriented programming using logic meta programming. Stef and I always confuse joinpoints and pointcuts.
Maybe that’s because both contain point, or because cut uses the mathematical sense and I hated math jargon since my first year in university – group? ring? Laplacian? I especially like that last one because besides at least it indicates who invented it, which is a really useful indication, isn’t it?
Maybe pointcut should remind us that aspects crosscut? But to non-native english speakers this is not so far of cutpoint, and to me weaving an aspect is more like joining things than cutting them…
For the record:
- joinpoints are specific places in the program execution at which aspects could be weaved, and
- pointcuts are sets of joinpoints that define where a piece of aspect code will be actually weaved. I’d map joinpattern more easily to this concept.
On Smalltalk
Posted by Damien Pollet Fri, 24 Nov 2006 09:56:18 GMT
On Smalltalk is a great blog on Smalltalk and Seaside by Ramon Leon. Go read it now!
…and since it was kinda asked for in the comments, I’ll complete this post with my partial list of other blogs from the Smalltalk community. First there is a planet-style meta-blog that already aggregates most of the blogs in this list, and the weekly squeak news. Then, from my Smalltalk RSS subscriptions, the most notable entries are blogs by:
- Avi Bryant, author of Seaside and DabbleDB;
- James Robertson, product manager at Cincom,
- and Serge Stinckwich who is part of the irreductible french smalltalkers :)
To more precisely answer Sébastien’s comment, the recent community news I’d note would be the open-sourcing of Strongtalk, the Squeak license changes to APSL 2 then Apache, and that Smalltalk in general is indeed benefiting from the current momentum in dynamic languages, thanks to Python, Ruby, and again Seaside.
On the Squeak side, 3.9 final was recently released, and it’s a great step from a happy mess to an environment more suitable for serious playing, especially with traits, the cleaner closure compiler, Damien Cassou’s image for developers, and Craig Latta’s promising spoon…
