Posts with keyword: smalltalk


Pico Engine 1.8 Is for Builders

Smalltalk taught a generation of programmers what it felt like to build by conversing with a live system, and Alan Kay hoped it would turn users into builders. Version 1.8 of the pico engine takes both ideas seriously: a better developer UI for people, an MCP surface for agents, and a schema underneath that makes both possible. This post describes the release and why the builders it serves don't all have to be developers.
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Alan Kay's Early History of Smalltalk

If you're interested in programming language design, this history of Smalltalk by Alan Kay from the 1993 HOPL conference is worth reading. That was the second HOPL conference. The third is happening June 9-10 in San Diego. I'd go if it wasn't on a weekend. I refuse to do weekend conferences. Still, it looks like a great program.
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Applied Web Heresies: ETech 2007

I really wanted to go to Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software by Amy Jo Kim, but my inner geek won out and I went to Applied Web Heresies with Avi Bryant (slides). I hope someone else took good notes. The basis for the talk is Seaside, a web framework for Smalltalk that Avi wrote several years ago. The problem with Seaside is you're not going to use it! There are a lot of interesting ideas in Seaside that people should know, so this tutorial is way of spreading the ideas outside of Smalltalk.
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Ways of Thinking, Ways of Doing

In a recent column, Jon Udell says "much of what seems to be modern innovation is, in fact, rediscovery of ... Lisp and Smalltalk." He goes on later to say: If existing tools can do more than we realize, we could spare ourselves a bit of grief. But probably not a lot. Translating ways of thinking into ways of doing always takes longer than we predict. From The spiral staircase of SOA | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-09-28 | By Jon UdellReferenced Wed Oct 12 2005 09:55:00 GMT-0600 (MDT) This is an interesting point and one that's under-appreciated, particularly
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