The first modern Smalltalk (according to Alan Kay) was Smalltalk-76… as in 1976. That’s 30 years ago. This is what Steve Jobs & crew saw in ‘79 on their famous visit to PARC.

There is lots of activity in the Smalltalk world at the moment.

The Smalltalk Industry Council is alive and well.

With Smalltalk Solutions being held in Toronto again, there’s some local buzz. Here’s one article in itbusiness.ca.

This article in eWeek on Cincom Smalltalk.

Instantiations has picked up IBM’s VisualAge Smalltalk and are actively developing and promoting it.

Ambrai is well underway with an OS X native Smalltalk system, which looks very promising.

Dr. Dobbs as this article on SeaSide, a web app framework by Avi Bryant et.al.

So, why the fuss about Ruby? Why don’t we just use Smalltalk.. It’s everything Ruby is, and so much more. This train of thought keeps surfacing for me.. maybe it’s time to really follow it through. Sure… I’ll keep using Ruby for knocking out scripts, utilities, and small applications. It’s good for that. But I hope to use Smalltalk for more & more over time.

My first OO language was Smalltalk. I learned about OO from Smalltalk. Since then I’ve been fortunate enough to spend many years working professionally in Smalltalk, but lately it’s been C++, Java, and C#. I’ve been using Ruby a lot recently as well.. but I always feel drawn back to Smalltalk. I’ve made an effort to get back to using it at times.

I’ve been using Smalltalk with a vengeance lately. My first undertaking is a port of rSpec for VisualWorks Smalltalk 7.4. A version for Squeak will follow soon afterwards, that being followed by a version for Ambrai Smalltalk.

Tom White’s Blog: Literate Programming with jMock:

Posted by tomwhite on May 11, 2006 at 11:10 AM

“We’ve been using jMock at our company for some time now. We’ve found it great for test driven development and isolating our unit tests from the rest of the system more effectively. One aspect of jMock that stands out for me is its idea of constraints. In fact, we’ve found this idea so useful that we always use the org.jmock.MockObjectTestCase base class rather than junit.framework.TestCase, even when we aren’t mocking anything out. This seems to have registered with the jMock development team, as they are planning to extract the constraints into a separate project, codenamed Hamcrest (it’s an anagram of “matchers”).”

(Via Steve Freeman.)

Dr. Dobb’s | Smalltalk: Requiem or Resurgence? | May 6, 2006:

Jeremy Chan

The grandaddy of the object-oriented world, Smalltalk has fascinated developers since it appeared on the programming scene.
Jeremy Chan is a Principal Consultant at the Jonah Group and a Technical Architect with over 10 years of experience in object-oriented software engineering.

The August 1978 issue of BYTE magazine had a language feature that included a small picture of the ‘Land Of Small Talk’, perched on a tower amid Fortran Ocean, to the south of Pascal’s Triangle, North of Lisp Jungle, and East of the Basic Sea. The following text, associated with a description of the language, uncannily describes the state of Smalltalk both past and present.”

…

At the recent Smalltalk Solutions Conference, Georg Heeg organized a talk around what he termed “The Smalltalk Paradox”, as enumerated in the quotation above. Nostalgic as always for the full-force return of Smalltalk to the fore of modern object-oriented software development, I listened attentively.

Go read the whole article… it’s nicely done.

In the “it’s a small world” category, I hired/supervised Jeremy on one of his work terms when he was at Carleton University. What langauge were we using? Smalltalk, of course.