http://www.zeromq.org/
http://www.zeromq.org/bindings:smalltalk
http://www.squeaksource.com/ZeroMQ

Here's a Ralph Johnson-ism for you: "Floating point is broken 
arithmetic". Seems his bete noire as an undergraduate and grad student 
was floating point. He'd get As in all his courses, but stumble on 
anything related to floating point. Then one day he figured it was just 
broken and never had a problem again.

Ralph Johnson and Sam Adams from IBM, who is doing the parallel OOP talk 
today, sat at the back of the Dart presentation, laughed at things Eric 
Clayberg was saying, and generally were like the bad kids in the class. 
Clayberg would ask what was going on at the back row and just what was 
so funny. Ralph would say enigmatic things like "I'm really glad Dart 
has floating point!" I do get the impression they all know each other.

Dart has a type system, but you don't need to use it. And you can use it 
wrong.

int notReallyAnInt = 'Aaron'

This works just fine. Apparently the type system "is designed not to be 
sound".
Dart takes the idea of 'isolates' from Erlang. They are  processes that 
don't share state, so I guess they are the opposite of threads. There is 
an override for definitions, so it's possible to have two isolates, two 
threads with separate definitions of something as fundamental as Symbol.
Dart has no reflection, though they are planning to add 'mirrors' to 
provide it. This seems to be where you copy an object and make 
reflective requests of it without touching the original.
Clayberg said over and over that they want to make Dart familiar, so 
arrays start at zero. This kind of thing.
There is no eval() as in JavaScript. I'd imagine that cuts down on the 
metaprogramming capability. eval() allows for the program to generate 
code that it can execute within itself. It's slow and Dart wants to be 
speedy.
You can snapshot with Dart and it can compile to JavaScript.

It's hard to know who Dart is for, what its target market is, if there 
was an origin story, etc. One person asked whether Dart would replace 
Java on Android. Or is Dart to replace JavaScript for JavaScript 
programmers? It does seem plausible that Dart is for Java programmers 
extending their reach into the browser. The presentation was about 
features and not strategy, so it wasn't clear to me.

Earlier in the day I met Sebastian Heidbrink of Heidbrink Consulting. He 
lives on Vancouver island and tends a banking client in Germany. Half of 
his coworkers never realized he moved. When he goes from Vancouver 
island to Vancouver the city he finds people so frenetic as to be 
distressing. I find that hilarious. When I go to Vancouver I feel as 
though I've been forcibly sedated.

Sebastian said "I've got Seaside running on ZeroMQ". I had no idea what 
that meant. He's a big believer of the cloud as an application. If 
something needs doing, don't add it to your code, fire a socket at 
something that already does the job. ZeroMQ allows to ... I'm not sure 
what it does other than it's a networking layer and allows many things 
to run at once. It's interesting and there are links above with a 
binding on SqueakSource.

Johnny T also know as John Thornton made a presentation on Amber, which 
looks very polished. He had a slide describing how primitive it is to 
switch from a text editor to a browser when writing HTML, JS, or CSS, 
and isn't it wonderful that you can use this great in-browser browser to 
do it all in the same place the way Amber does. I think this is silly. I 
have to add precisely two keyboard shortcuts to go back and forth 
between TextMate and Chrome. I like it. I think Johnny T is prone to be 
a little susceptible to the 'goly! gee!' nature of things, so that he 
confuses what is cool for what is practical.

His presentation on Amber was good. He likes to do things like code 
node.js applications using Amber. After his talk he talked with 
Heidbrink who told him about ZeroMQ. His conversion was instantaneous. 
The two are going to do a lightning talk on Wednesday about using ZeroMQ 
for Amber.

Today Sam Adams gives a talk on parallel OOP, which I think is going to 
be about the Roar VM. Chris Muller is going to give a talk on 
Location-Aware Networks, Context and Business-Intelligence. The 
Smalltalk Directions panel with Ralph Johnson is today. Again, I have no 
idea what that'll be about. I figure I'll make it to those three. The 
others that catch my eye are Using Glorp with New Projects That Need to 
Access Legacy Data by Mark Grinnell and Object-Centric Profiling: 
Advanced Visualizations to Tame Wild Execution with Alexander Bergel.

There was a boat ride at the end of yesterday on the Gulf. That was fun. 
There are pelicans here with eighteen inch beaks. The sand beaches are 
like white sugar. The boat trip out into the bay was an hour and a great 
way to drink and chat.

Chris