SqueakEnd reports

Jim Benson jb at speed.net
Wed May 8 02:53:18 UTC 2002


Karl Ramberg wrote:
> Are there any reports witten about the SqueakEnd for the rest of us?


> Doug Way wrote:
> Well, John McIntosh wasn't there to give his usual in-depth report, so I'm
afraid there won't be a good hour-by-hour synopsis available. :-)

I write:

I missed Johns writeup also. I am I going to find out what was *really*
going on there?

I'll tell you what I got out of the weekend . I arrived in Atlanta on
Thursday night, and spent Friday morning taking a hike through the Atlanta
Botantical Garden. Atlanta seemed like a nice place, and it was interesting
to be walking through a hardwood forest in the middle of the downtown area.

When the conference started, Alan Kay gave a speech. I had never seen Alan
give his talk, and I got a much better feeling for the initial impetus of
the Squeak implementation. Overall, Squeak *should* be a system that an
individual can understand in its entirety, and an adopter should be able to
maintain a relatively complex application with only a couple of folks. It
seems to me that the system has grown since its inception and is a little
beyond this goal right now, hopefully when we redo the image with modules we
can get back to that ideal. Squeak has always struck me as a computer
science degree in a box.

The thing that I got out of the talk was the difference of concept versus
implentation. There are a lot of concepts in computer science that are
difficult to realize from their implementation.  This difference is one of
the points that Smalltalk tries to address, so that you can just describe
your concepts and "see" how the resulting code solution implements the
concept, and not get bogged down in the inevitable programming minutuae a
lot of other programming languages bring with them to the table.

For example, a finite state machine is usually represented conceptually on
the chalk board as several circles representing state with transition arrows
inbetween. However, when you see a "C" implementation of that concept, it is
usually some hacked up bit table. In and of itself, that's OK (for either
efficiency or as an output from some other formalized process) but it's a
big leap from what's really going on conceptually to the actual code itself.
You can also make the case that it is difficult to maintain due to this
difference, because when you come back a few months later you have to
unravel the code to "understand" it again and implement your changes. My own
experience has told me that it is much better just to code up the simplest
thing;  it just gets confusing over time if I try to do anything really
clever.

Lex gave a good introduction to how to use Squeak after dinner. I don't
really think of this gathering as a Squeakend, it was more a gathering a
people who were interested in Squeak for a variety of reasons. This happened
to include some of what we think of as "Squeakers" like the people on this
list. In that sense, it was nice to meet other list mates and put names to
faces. However, the agenda was pretty packed with interesting talks, so we
didn't have a chance to really sit down as a group and talk and/or code.

There were a lot of presentations Saturday and Sunday. Most of the talks
were on the advanced introduction level. The ones that I attended included
3D Graphics, Sound, Swiki, and Nebraska. In general, it was material that
you probably covered if you have tried to use any of those facilities in
Squeak on your own. The one thing that made those talks interesting though
was that the initial implementors of those ideas in Squeak gave the talks.
By "reading between the lines" you could pick up a whole lot more than what
was presented, and made it more than worth the time. Also, Bijan gave a talk
on the game of life, and it was interesting because this was his first
attempt at an Active Essay. I thought he did a good job.

Oh, and we ate a lot. I like to think I did particularly well in that
department. I tend to not care about what I eat when  on the road to begin
with (something about when the cat is away, the mice will play), and when
you add that to having a lot of food around ... ;-)

One thing out of the ordinary was Dan Ingalls talk on the new modules
system. It sounded to me like most of the architecture has been pretty well
layed out, but that there is still quite a bit of work ahead before it can
really be pushed out the door. This is a talk that you needed to be there to
appreciate all of the subtle implications and tradeoffs that have to be made
in order for this thing to work right.

Saturday night was demo night, and some interesting things were presented by
the Squeak developers.

Talking to the other Squeak users there, I was surprised by one of the
problems that a lot of new users are having. Craig Latta mentioned that his
students were having problems finding the correct versions of Squeak to
download for all of the different platforms. When 3.2 gets shipped, we'll
have to make a concentrated effort to eliminate this silly problem. We
really need to work on funneling the users to one place for all of their
downloading needs.

I stayed over an extra night and left Monday morning. I was in the airport
near the ticket gates, when all of the sudden I saw a tall looking man
traveling very fast coming down the corridor through a swarm of people. It
turned out to be a policeman on a Segway Human Transport machine!!!
http://www.segway.com/  It almost seemed to make sense in that environment
(I laughed for a long time after seeing the promotional video on the Segway
site). I was going to try to stop the policeman and ask him questions, but
thought better when I noticed the gun strapped to his waist. The policeman
might have thought that having some madman chasing him at a full run would
seem suspicious, so I thought better to err on the side of caution. I think
they sensed my lingering excitement at the gate, as they did the full "take
off your shoes and hold out your arms" search before I boarded the aircraft.
When the woman opened my laptop up to examine it, I offered to do a Squeak
demo, but she didn't seem very interested.

This just tells you, you need to go to these things. They're a lot more fun
to attend than to read about.

Jim




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