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 at http://smalltalk.ottawa.on.ca 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
Time: 6:30 PM
Location: Room 5115, Herzberg Laboratories, Carleton University (see 
details below)

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
Bedarra Corporation, Carleton University and University Of Queensland

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 at simberon.com if you plan to attend.