The Ottawa Carleton Smalltalk Users Group is proud to announce a special distinguished speaker to kick off its 2003/2004 year. Visit the OCSTUG web site for more information.
You Can't Do That With Smalltalk! " Can You?
Lessons From The Past " Challenges For The Future
Dave Thomas
| Date: |
Thursday, September 18, 2003
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| Time: |
6:30 PM
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| Location: |
Room 5115, Herzberg Laboratories, Carleton University (see details below)
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Abstract
In this talk I provide a personal perspective on the evolution of commercial Smalltalk as it escaped from the Parc to the Street. The papers and dialog I see today in the Smalltalk community, and especially the Squeak communities are very much reminiscent of the excitement we felt as researchers and developers in the early 80s. Our challenge then was to be able to keep using Smalltalk in research or commercial development outside our tiny community.
In the early 80s we had very limited access to the technology and the implementations lacked the features and performance needed for any kind of serious industrial or research use. Indeed many of us lacked the hardware to even use the technology in a serious application.
We examine the technical and business contributions that both enabled and hindered the development of a vibrant commercial and educational Smalltalk industry in the early 90s. We show that by stepping up to and addressing several external challenges the Smalltalk market was created and flourished.
We briefly discuss the Smalltalk commercial inertia, language entropy and developer arrogance that allowed it in part to be eclipsed by other technologies rather than evolve to meet the needs of web and open source communities. We advocate for constantly evolution of Smalltalk, rather than the preservation Smalltalk as an interesting software artifact for every trapped in its own self-image. There are many exciting things happening outside Smalltalk that we need to bring into our world, and some old baggage we need to throw out.
We challenge future Smalltalk advocates to address the needs of the external developer community to enable the wider spread use of Smalltalk. Unless the needs of the broader development community are met Smalltalkers will remain in their cloisters preaching to each other rather than saving developers from middleware hell.
| Speaker |
Dave Thomas
|
| From |
Bedarra Corporation, Carleton University and University Of Queensland
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Dave Thomas is a popular keynote speaker and a recognized international expert in: software engineering; virtual machines; object technology; embedded systems and end-user programming. Dave is best known to the Smalltalk community as the founder of Object Technology International (OTI) developers of Envy/Developer a unique CM environment for object oriented development; virtual machines (Smalltalk/Vmac and Envy/Smalltalk) and IDEs for IBM VisualAge for Smalltalk; for Java; Micro Edition for Embedded Systems and Eclipse. In recognition of his contributions to object technology Dave was elected to the IBM Academy
He is currently CEO of Bedarra Corporation, which he founded in 1998. Bedarra provides assistance to new ventures both in new and existing companies as well as R&D and competitive analysis. Bedarra focuses on the transfer of research from the lab to commercial success. Bedarra has assisted more than 30 companies in Australia, Canada, the US and Europe. Bedarra is currently focused on: eLearning; Next Generation Application Development; Agile Software Development and Pervasive Computing.
Dave was recently appointed a founding Director in Agile Alliance, which promotes fast user, focused software development. He is on the editorial board of the new online Journal of Object Technology (JOT) and a columnist in Otland. Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University and the University of Queensland in Brisbane Australia where he works with the DSTC research lab.
Location Details
The meeting will be held in Room 5115, Herzberg Laboratories (building 13 on the map ). Pay-parking is available in Lot 1, 2, and parking meters can be found along University Drive. Free parking is available across Bronson Avenue opposite Lot 5.
Please RSVP to david@simberon.com if you plan to attend
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