Dilbert
Posted by Damien Pollet Mon, 19 Mar 2007 14:15:08 GMT
Summer of Code 2007: Squeak is in!
Posted by Damien Pollet Thu, 15 Mar 2007 15:05:00 GMT
Giovanni Corriga has announced that Squeak was accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s Summer of Code:
I’d like to thank all the people who helped preparing Squeak’s submission form, and all the mentors and students that have made themselves available for this effort.
Indeed, thanks to you too, Giovanni!
If you are motivated to have fun hacking with Squeak and getting paid for it, there is a list of project ideas on the Squeak.org wiki, and of course you can propose your own.
James Robertson and Serge Stinckwich also relayed the announce. And GNUstep is in too.
Fosdem 2007
Posted by Damien Pollet Tue, 20 Feb 2007 10:47:00 GMT
This weekend (24–25 february) I’m going to Bruxelles for my yearly beer pilgrimage. Oh, and attending the Fosdem, too ;-)
Beer recommendations welcome in the comments; see you there!
iPod healing
Posted by Damien Pollet Wed, 24 Jan 2007 18:12:09 GMT
I’m rediscovering my iPod!
I played iPod-surgeon, tinkering with the poor guy’s innards to install a replacement battery. It has a little mark on one side because I’ve been a little heavy-handed with the bundled plastic tools, but overall the operation was easy. And now I can listen for more than 3 albums on a single charge, isn’t that great? In fact the kit specs say that the new battery has 30% more capacity than the original one, so one charge should last a full working day playing music.
Now, since after all I’m following Yann’s example, I wonder if I should start to smoke, just so that I can stop after a while and believe I have new money to spend on geek gadgets :)
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.
A new Ruby/Objective-C bridge
Posted by Damien Pollet Fri, 05 Jan 2007 17:51:40 GMT
Tim Burks recently announced RubyObjC, a new binding between the Ruby and Objective-C programming languages. Tim previously documented the other Ruby/Objective-C binding, RubyCocoa, through the rubycocoa.com website.
To get started with RubyObjC:
- install the gem:
sudo gem install rubyobjc --source http://www.rubyobjc.com - generate an application:
rubyapp myapp - build it:
cd myapp; rake - run it:
rake run
Then follow the tutorial.
On the implementation side, the docs mention that RubyObjC directly inserts handlers for Ruby methods in Objective-C method tables and adds handlers for Objective-C methods to the Ruby method tables, so the bridging overhead should be minimal.
I would really like to have such a bridge for Squeak…
Update: RubyCocoa 0.10.0 was just released too (via lrz).
Bad assumptions
Posted by Damien Pollet Wed, 13 Dec 2006 02:15:54 GMT
James Robertson already nicely answered this guy about Cees’ comments on Java, so I…must…not…troll…further…phew.
But I couldn’t ignore this:
6 months isn’t really enough to get properly comfortable with all aspects of a language.
OK, so let’s make my timeline of things with Smalltalk:
- getting over the, hmm, aesthetics of Squeak… not sure I’m done with that :-)
- learning the whole syntax, 30min.
- starting to get my way using the tools and write simple stuff, 1 day.
- knowing the basic stuff in the library, like iterations, conditionals, understanding that the debugger is really my best friend: 1 week
- getting used to the image, exploring the system, reading the source, and starting to get what object-orientation really was about: 1-2 months. At this point, reading code really becomes an opportunity to learn interesting new stuff from others.
It’s been a little bit more than six months now and think I can say I’m properly comfortable with all aspects of the language. In fact I’ve also looked into all this machinery that looked like a mysterious black monolith before: the metaclass hierarchy, what exactly is a virtual machine doing, how are exceptions and continuations implemented, at the runtime objects like CompiledMethod, the bytecodes, etc.
Even with Python or Ruby I wasn’t drawn in the language like with Smalltalk. Both have really weird design decisions, like meaningful spaces, and the general procedural-with-OO-afterthought feeling for Python, or the inheritance and interpreter kludges in Ruby. Smalltalk and in particular Squeak does have ugly code (Morphic anyone?), but it’s just library code. The language itself has a beautiful ideal and it’s so light and fast while being so dynamic, you just have to go and look how that miracle happens.
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…
