Finding the Swan in Squeak's Ugly Duckling
Squeak Smalltalk is wholly unlike any other open source programming tool you’ve worked with – and mostly in good ways. Unfortunately, it’s the bad ways that make the first impression. This hands-on tutorial will help you get past the unfamiliar and the unwieldy so that you can take advantage of the elegant and productive environment that lies underneath. We’ll cover what makes Smalltalk so wonderful: the “turtles all the way down” approach to language design, the highly integrated code browsers, object inspectors, and debuggers, the accessibility (and hackability) of every piece of library code, the built-in refactoring and unit testing support, and the extreme dynamicity and portability of the environment. But we’ll also address the practical concerns that keep people away from Squeak: how to get rid of the pastel colors and bitmapped fonts so that you can stand to look at it; how to get your source code into version control so you can collaborate with others; how to find documentation and examples; how to integrate with the OS and with C libraries; how to manage deployment.
People planning to attend this session also want to see:
Randal L. Schwartz
Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.
Randal L. Schwartz is a renowned expert on the Perl and Smalltalk programming languages, having contributed to a dozen top-selling books on the subject, and over 250 magazine articles. Schwartz runs a Perl and Smalltalk training and consulting company (Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc of Portland, Oregon), and is a highly sought-after speaker for his masterful stage combination of technical skill, comedic timing, and crowd rapport. And he’s a pretty good Karaoke singer, winning contests regularly.
Books authored/coauthored:
- Programming Perl (multiple editions)
- Learning Perl (multiple editions)
- Learning Perl on Win32 Systems
- Learning Perl Objects References and Modules (multiple editions)
- Effective Perl Programming: Writing Better Programs with Perl
- Object Oriented Perl
- Randal Schwartz’s Perls of Wisdom
Magazine articles and columns:
- UnixReview Magazine
- PerformanceComputing Magazine
- SysAdmin Magazine and Website
- WebTechniques Magazine and Website
- Linux Magazine and Website
- The Perl Journal E-Magazine
- Apple Developer Works Website
Regular contributor to online forums:
- The Perl Monastery
- Use Perl
- newsgroups comp.lang.perl.misc et. seq.
- newsgroup comp.lang.perl.announce (moderator since inception)
- perl.org mailing lists
- Perl mailing lists on Yahoo! Groups
- various Smalltalk and Squeak mailing lists
Podcast producer:
- FLOSS Weekly
- Insight Cruises News-es
- segment producer for Squeak news for Industry Misinterpretations (Smalltalk podcast)
- segment producer for Perl news
- Occasional co-host on MacBreakWeekly and This Week in Tech
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