[Squeakland] From John Blue: FYI podcast on Squeak use in commercial setting, Dabble DB, comparison to Ruby...

[john blue]

FYI, Avi Bryant, Smalltalk's Lessons for Ruby,
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3432.html

I found this podcast interesting because it talks about Smalltalk use
in a commercial setting and philosophy of software models. This is
more of a business focused podcast but may be of interest to those
doing development and extensions on Squeak.

John Blue

What the heck is "innovation" anyway? => InnovationCreation.US
Subscribe to RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/InnovationCreation

LinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnblue

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summary of podcast

The speakers of Hindi and Urdu can perfectly understand each other
without knowing that they're talking in two different languages. Even
though the langauges have different backgrounds and scripts, they
sound similar. So is the case with Ruby and Smalltalk. The two
languages have much in common and, being older, Smalltalk can provide
a blueprint for Ruby.

There is an incorrect assumption that because of Ruby's open classes
and duck typing it is difficult to make a fast VM for it. Between 1989
to 1991, the Self project was a Smalltalk research initiative aimed at
making dynamically typed languages run fast. The team spun off a new
startup and the resulting implementation, called Strongtalk, was
bought back and adopted by Sun for its Java Virtual Machine (JVM). So
that problem has really been solved. Ruby can take a lesson about
object persistence from Smalltalk. As William Gibson said, "The future
is already here. It is just not evenly distributed." Likewise, the
future of Ruby is in Smalltalk as it stands today.