[squeak-dev] Squeak Community Hangout report

Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel at merlintec.com
Tue Jun 11 20:17:53 UTC 2013


Yesterday we had another Squeak Community Hangout (some of the previous
ones were on April 22, April 8, March 25, March 11, November 2012 and
August 30). Though there were fewer people than normal, I thought it
would be interesting to mention a bit of what was talking about for
those who weren't there.

Bob Arning shared a scan of a very nice article from a late 1976 issue
of Popular Science which had a picture of him running a program he had
written for the Dazzler board on the Altair 8800 computer. This was at a
store he owned at the time. He also shared a reimplementation of that
same program in Squeak.

Edgar De Cleene mentioned his frustration with the lack of something
between Pharo's "throw out the old stuff no matter what breaks" scheme
and Squeak's extremely conservative position. I suggested that allowing
a system to have several separate images working together could be a
solution to that, as well as making good use of today's multicore
machines. It would also be a way to add security to SqueakNOS. We also
talked a bit about Spoon.

Hans-Martin Mosner asked if anybody had Squeak code for Elliptic Curve
Cryptography. He mentioned that he is part of the Squeak special
interest group on cryptography (http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5776), but
nobody there has this stuff and he doesn't know any other Smalltalk that
has it.

That was about it, though since these meetings are supposed to last 24
hours it is possible that more people showed up when I wasn't there.
Most of the conversations are about Squeak, of course, but in the past
we have also talked about subjects such as DRAM bit geometry and the
effect of alpha particles. And at one point yesterday we had a "show off
your pet" moment. :-)

-- Jecel



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