On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 8:15 AM, Yang Ha Nguyen cmpitg@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/02/2010 12:09 PM, Serge Stinckwich wrote:
Hi all,
we are now 13 people registered on the Smalltalk-vn mailing-list.
What have been done in the previous months since the creation of the mailing-list in June 2008:
- June 2008: Creation of the Smalltalk-vn mailing list
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/smalltalk-vn
- Jan 2009: Smalltalk flyer in vietnamese, thanks to Nguyen Hong Son :
http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st/seaside/pier/Smalltalk/flyers
- April 2009: Presentation of Smalltalk at BarCamp Hanoi 2009:
http://www.slideshare.net/SergeStinckwich/smalltalk-bar-camp-hanoi-2009
- September 2009: Presentation of EToys in Ha Noi:
http://www.slideshare.net/SergeStinckwich/an-instrument-whose-music-is-ideas...
- May 2010: Talk at IFI/Ha Noi about Pharo Smalltalk:
http://www.slideshare.net/SergeStinckwich/pharo-an-innovative-and-opensource...
- June 2010: OLPC Vietnam dev meetinghttp://olpc.vn/
- July 2010: Magic-Words project with a group of vietnamese students
http://code.google.com/p/magic-words/
I put everything on this web page: http://community.ofset.org/index.php/Smalltalk_in_Vietnam You could add your name in the list if you want (just ask me for login/password).
This is quite a small community at the moment and i'm looking for more ideas to have more people joining us. Maybe we could organize a Smalltalk meeting every week or every two weeks: just to talk, do some peer programming and do some nice demonstrations. I'm also happy to do a talk in your company/institution if there enough people interested.
BTW, do'nt shy to talk here and express your opinons. You can even speak in Vietnamese if you prefer ;^-) Regards,
Hi all,
There are many practically difficulties about growing the Smalltalk community in Vietnam. The biggest problem, I believe, is that there very few people know about Smalltalk and its programming paradigm. In Vietnam, students learn Pascal from secondary school and high school, even in university, they are taught mostly VB, C/C++, Java and .NET languages (VB.NET, C# for almost all situations) which are at different paradigm from Smalltalk. Thus, the vital point to grow our Smalltalk-VN community is to raise people's awareness about the Smalltalk language, its implementations, what it can do, and how things are done in Smalltalk. Personally, that's what I'm trying to do, little by little. To do it, we need to make a clear and flexible plan.
You are right Yang, but more people know about Smalltalk in Vietnam that it seems at the beginning. I know a professor in HCMC who teach Smalltalk at the University. He even build a Smalltalk called Smalltalk 2000 in the nineties. Some people in South-Asia know Smalltalk, because they have worked with a agent-based simulation program called Cormas also built in Smalltalk: http://cormas.cirad.fr/indexeng.htm
Yes you are right, no formal plan, we just need to be flexible and talk about it ;-) If you are not convinced that Smalltalk is interesting even if you don't want to use it for future development, you can read this article: http://www.dafydd.net/archive/2010/why-smalltalk-isnt-just-another-language/ Smalltalk is all about flexibility and agility.
You know at the beginning in the french Smalltalk mailing-list, we were 3 guys and several years after, we are more than 100 people. And for the next ESUG conference in Barcelona, 22 french people already register, the most important group among all the countries (113 people register for the conference).
If we do something interesting in Vietnam, we could also ask for some support from ESUG (European Smalltalk User Group). I'm part of the board and we have several programs to help local groups: http://www.esug.org/Promotion
Another problem we are having is that, well, our community is small but we have not yet known each other. So when one has some problems while learning and doing programming with Smalltalk, s/he is shy to get help, to make it a topic for everyone to discuss about it. I like Serge's idea about having a weekly or biweekly meeting. Like he said, we could get to know each other, talk about Smalltalk and its development direction, do some demonstrations and presentations, discuss, make some tutorials (since there are few of tutorials compared to other "popular" languages) and improve them, ... It's all good for us, it does not cost a lot of time, and it's fun!
Hummm i like to have fun !!! Why programming and designing programs should be boring and cumbersome ;-) Some years ago, i attend several meetings of the Dojo XP group in Paris. They do a meeting every week, where some prepare a Kata, a programming exercice that he want to demonstrate by using test driven development (TDD). In some meetings, we use Smalltalk, in other Ruby or Haskell. It was extremely enjoying and fun ;-) There is a report of all these meetings here: http://wiki.agile-france.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?DojoDeveloppement We could do something like with a stronger focus on Smalltalk.
Do you know if there is other groups in Vietnam around dynamic languages like Ruby, Scala or Python ?
I'd love to hear ideas from you guys. If you are afraid of long writing, it's okay. Just drop a line about the time and we could have an offline meeting.
Yes, just drop a line to say something about you and your interest to be in this mailing-list ;-) For me, i enjoy Smalltalk because this is fun !
Regards,