Hi Squeakers,

I just wanted to write in with a quick report on a recent demonstration
I did for my my colleagues at work.

At the company I work for we are given one Friday a month to work on any
sort of project that interests us, whether or not it is related to the
work we do for the company, and so I usually end up playing around with
a project in Squeak. As part of the deal, we are asked to occasionally
present what we are working on to our peers, in the hopes that they can
do some learning from our projects as well.  

I didn't have any projects ready to demonstrate in a compelling way so I
decided to instead just show off Squeak itself and give people kind of
an introduction to Smalltalk and what I find so compelling about it. I
decided to go ahead and live code a version of the bouncing atoms morph,
using submorphs for the atoms, and developing the code as the parent
morph "stepped" away on screen, updating its behavior seamlessly.  I
demonstrated adding variables and method without stopping, changing the
methods and debugging them when I made mistakes, changing the entire
class of the onscreen morphs as the simulation ran and some of the cool
things about the language itself as well, like "build-your-own" if
statements and such.

Overall I think that I kind of blew a bunch of people's minds, what with
our day to day work being in C++ and always being in that
edit-compile-run-test cycle. Several people came up to me afterwards to
say how much they enjoyed seeing a different view of programming and
what it could represent and I hope to put together a few more
demonstrations in the coming months.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that Smalltalk is still surprising
people and exceeding their expectations 35 years on, and a large part of
it is thanks to all the great work that goes into Squeak from its
contributors.

Thanks for your efforts!
Jeff