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Yoshiki Ohshima - Croquet Microverse - 26 April 2023
by Giovanni Corriga 20 Apr '23

20 Apr '23

For this month's online presentation, Yoshiki Ohshima will demonstrate the Croquet Microverse ( https://croquet.io/ ), which is a 3D collaborative construction environment. It is an incarnation of Smalltalk-based Croquet but instead implemented in JavaScript. Microverse allows a group of users to collaboratively create new objects in a virtual space, and describe their behaviors in the live programming manner that can be used by professional programmers. The object extension mechanism used in the Microverse is heavily influenced by past class and object extension mechanisms, many of which originated from experimentation and implementation in Smalltalk. Likewise, the architecture of the Microverse application framework draws upon other frameworks such as Morphic and AppKit. Yoshiki will explain the connections between those systems and the Microverse. Yoshiki ( https://tinlizzie.org/ohshima/ ) joined Walt Disney Imagineering R&D in 2000 as an intern while attending the graduate school of Tokyo Institute of Technology, and helped develop prototypes of Disney's theme park attractions. He also has been involved in Alan Kay's research group, and participated in the research and development effort of education programming environment Squeak Etoys and later took the leading role. Yoshiki has worked at the Viewpoints Research Institute, SAP Labs CDG, and Y Combinator Research, all of which Dr. Kay founded or helped found. He was awarded his PhD. for designing and implementing a massively parallel particle programming system from Tokyo Institute of Technology. This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/ukstug/events/292570084/ ) to receive the meeting details.

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UK Smalltalk User Group meeting - Wednesday 29th March
by Giovanni Corriga 21 Mar '23

21 Mar '23

This month's online meeting introduces a new format whereby we'll give space to commercial companies to discuss how they make use of Smalltalk and contribute to the Smalltalk community. The first of this series will be Mercap Software ( https://www.mercapsoftware.com/en/ ), represented by Gabriel Cotelli, Inés Sosa, Iván Boaretto, Matías Fernandez, and Maximiliano Tabacman. During this talk, Mercap will showcase five of their solutions designed for different types of investors. They will shed light on how Mercap benefits from the open-source projects maintained by the Buenos Aires Smalltalk group on GitHub. They will share with you how they use these freely available frameworks to interact with databases, operate on math and time units, create custom CSS, declare interactions on web applications, display complex charts, manage application startup, and streamline the creation of Docker images. Gabriel Cotelli is a CS bachelor, continuous learner & free-thinker. Supporter of libre knowledge, human intelligence augmentation and open source software. Working in Smalltalk at Mercap since 2004. He's an active member of the Smalltalk development community and regular contributor to open source projects in Buenos Aires Smalltalk and Pharo. Inés Sosa writes code in Smalltalk. Iván Boaretto is a software developer by day and a computer science student by night. He is very passionate about his craft and is always striving to improve. Now, in his first time at the Smalltalks, he is looking to attract new blood to the wonderful Smalltalk community. Matías Fernandez is a software and tech enthusiast, and Smalltalk developer. Maximiliano Tabacman has been a part of Mercap since he started his studies in IT, which now include a PhD in Computer Sciences from the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales (UBA). His main interest is the design of systems that apply nature inspired concepts, such as evolutionary algorithms and neural networks. Smalltalk, with its object-message design, is his natural choice for a development platform. He is also the creator of ERA, a standalone web server application for running table-top roleplaying games, which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/ukstug/events/292128721/ ) to receive the meeting details.

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UK Smalltalk User Group Meeting - 22 February 2023
by Giovanni Corriga 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

WebAssembly (WASM - https://wikiwand.com/en/Webassembly ) is an instruction format for portable high-performance code, run by a stack-based virtual machine. To Smalltalkers, this sounds very familiar. WASM is supported by the three most popular web browsers, and by other host platforms as well. Perhaps we can translate certain Smalltalk compiled methods to WASM, augmenting our support for physical processors and for livecoding the Web. For our February meeting, Craig Latta will describe his initial experiments, using the Epigram compilation framework ( https://thiscontext.com/epigram ). Craig Latta ( https://thiscontext.com/ ) is a research computer scientist in Berkeley and Amsterdam, with interests including livecoding, music performance, and interactive visualization. The discovery of a mysteriously-placed copy of the Blue Book at university led to stints at several exploratory labs, and a pursuit of improvisation wherever code is found. This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/ukstug/events/291365015/ ) to receive the meeting details.

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UK Smalltalk User Group Meeting - 25th January 2023
by Giovanni Corriga 17 Jan '23

17 Jan '23

For the first UKSTUG online meeting of the year, Stéphane Rollandin will talk to us about muO: musical objects for Squeak ( http://www.zogotounga.net/comp/squeak/sqgeo.htm ). The presentation will focus on some of the interactive tools and subsystems widely used in muO, that are of interest in their own right, and potentially useful to others. The main emphasis will be on the large family of zoomable fields, which are modular plotting editors. Stéphane will demonstrate the workflow they are designed for, and show in what sense it is a seamless and natural exploitation of the Morphic framework. The code for these tools is somewhat entangled with the muO package, so Stéphane will also provide a Squeak image taylored to help people find their way there. Stéphane Rollandin has been doing independent research on software for musical composition and representation for the last 20 years, during his whole careeer as a stay-at-home father. After developing the GeoMaestro system for KeyKit, and the Csound-x package for Emacs, he was introduced to Smalltalk and never looked back. Besides muO, he developed for Squeak a modular Lisp interpreter, the LambdaMessageSend framework and a few games. He is now working on an experimental game engine with an emphasis on procedural generation and complex autonomous agents. He was formally educated in physics, and his other artistic ventures are in photography and aikido. His music is freely available online ( https://stephanerollandin.bandcamp.com/ ). Born in Marseille, he currently lives in the southern French Alps. This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/ukstug/events/290746320/ ) to receive the meeting details.

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UK Smalltalk User Group meeting - 28 December 2022
by Giovanni Corriga 19 Dec '22

19 Dec '22

For the UKSTUG 2023 holiday meeting, Simberon's David Buck will present Beagle Smalltalk. Over the past 8 years, David has been developing a Smalltalk virtual machine. He used it to release two Smalltalk Games written in VisualWorks to run on Andriod and iPhone devices. More recently, he's re-written the VM to use its own bytecode set and written his own Smalltalk compiler to make it a stand-alone Smalltalk environment called Beagle Smalltalk named after the ship that took Darwin on his voyage of discovery. David plans to release this as an open-source Smalltalk to help and encourage kids to explore the world of programming. In this talk, David presents the current status of the project and where he hopes to go with it. David Buck is the president of Simberon ( http://simberon.com/ ) - a company that has been providing Smalltalk training and consulting for over 25 years. Along with James Robertson, David produced the Industry Misinterpretations podcast and later the Smalltalk Reflections podcast with Craig Latta. David remains a Smalltalk enthusiast and works to spread the word about Smalltalk. This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/ukstug/events/290409453/ ) to receive the meeting details.

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UK Smalltalk User Group meeting - 30 November 2022
by Giovanni Corriga 29 Nov '22

29 Nov '22

For this month's UKSTUG meeting, Dave Mason will talk about Zag Smalltalk, a new Smalltalk VM written in Zig. Dave Mason ( http://sarg.ryerson.ca/dmason/ ) has been a professor of Computer Science at Toronto Metropolitan University (previously known as Ryerson) for 41 years. He has done research on operating systems, software reliability and programming languages. Current research is mostly around Smalltalk and other dynamic languages. If forced to program very low level projects such as virtual machines, he is willing to use Zig or Rust, but for any other purpose, he insists on using higher productivity languages - primarily Smalltalk. Zag Smalltalk ( https://github.com/dvmason/Zag-Smalltalk ) is a principle-based Smalltalk VM. "Principled" means that the only 3 operations are: message send, assignment, and return. 1) it is designed from the ground up to use multi-processing, to leverage multi-core systems. 2) There is no special-casing of methods like ifTrue:ifFalse or whileTrue:, although of course some methods are implemented by primitive methods. It does aggressive inlining of methods and blocks. 3) “Source” code is maintained as ASTs. 4) Compiled code runs in a dual form of threaded code and JIT’ed machine code that seamlessly interoperate. 5) It has a partially-copying and partially-non-moving garbage collector. 6) It keeps many more values as immediate, including symbols. 7) It uses a single-level dispatch mechanism to implement Smalltalk dispatch semantics The research question is, "Can this be made fast enough to be competitive?” Preliminary results are encouraging. This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/ukstug/events/290036186 ) to receive the meeting details.

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Looking for presenters for UK Smalltalk User Group online meetings
by Giovanni Corriga 21 Nov '22

21 Nov '22

Hi, The UK Smalltalk User Group is looking for presenters for the online events that we have been running since April 2020. If you have anything you'd like to share with the community - no matter how small! - please contact us at info(a)uksmalltalk.org or giovanni(a)corriga.net to discuss what you can offer. Cheers, Giovanni

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UK Smalltalk User Group Meeting - 26 October 2022
by Giovanni Corriga 26 Oct '22

26 Oct '22

For this month's meeting, we'll take it easy and have an online social! Bring your favourite drinks - beer, coffee, or whatever you prefer! This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/ukstug/events/289339721/ ) to receive the meeting details.

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UK Smalltalk User Group meeting - Wednesday, 28 September 2022
by Giovanni Corriga 26 Sep '22

26 Sep '22

After a two year pause, the ESUG conference returned this past summer when Smalltalkers from all over the world met in Novi Sad, Serbia for a week of presentations, and socials ( https://esug.github.io/2022-Conference/conf2022.html ). For this month's UKSTUG meeting, we'll have an open discussion about what was presented at the conference. If you've been there, join us to tell us what you liked, and why. If you could not go, join us and discover what went down in Novi Sad! This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/ukstug/events/288718350/ ) to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!

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UK Smalltalk User Group Meeting - 31 August 2022
by Giovanni Corriga 11 Aug '22

11 Aug '22

For this month, we'll be welcoming Instantiations' Mariano Martinez Peck and Seth Berman, who will be talking to us about asynchronous programming in Smalltalk. Whether you’re interested in starting a new project or enhancing an existing system, asynchronous programming offers a great way to optimize application speed and help ensure maintainability as complexity increases. We’ll discuss the asynchronous programming approach, why it’s important, and show live demos in the VAST Platform ( https://www.instantiations.com/vast-platform/ ) of how to get started with futures/promises, asynchronous streams/zones, and more! Mariano Martinez Peck ( https://twitter.com/martinezpeck ) is a senior systems engineer specializing in dynamic programming language software. In 2018, he joined Instantiations to further develop the VAST Platform through the addition of new frameworks, libraries and tools, as well as improving the existing code base of VAST. He is active in the Smalltalk development community, and has used his expertise to co-author numerous open source projects. Mariano has a PhD in Computer Science, and his academic research has been published across various international journals. Seth Berman ( https://twitter.com/sethloco78 ) is President & CEO of Instantiations ( https://www.instantiations.com/ ). He leads a dedicated team that tirelessly supports and enhances Instantiations' VAST Platform, while he guides expansion into new software/service areas like IoT, cloud, and edge computing solutions. Before leading Instantiations, Seth joined the company in 2011 as a software engineer working on projects ranging from advanced code editors and cryptography libraries to FFI enhancements and virtual machine implementations. Previously, he worked for the US government in a variety of domains including stochastic simulation, operations research, grid computing, and link analysis. Seth has a B.S. in Computer Science and an M.S. in Software Engineering. This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/ukstug/events/cbklbrydclbgc/ ) to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!

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