Version 0.11 of sSpec just got published. This one has much improved failure messages. Thanks to the folks on the Cincom smalltalk irc channel for their help, especially rh & jarober.

For those without a pub Store account.. get one or for now.. here’s the parcel files.

I want to take a bit of a look back at the mid 1980s… 20 years ago

In the mid 80s I was working as a programmer, using languages like Assembly, C, Pascal, and Fortran. And I was learning OO by studying Smalltalk. OO was hot & new.. and hardly anyone knew it.

Apple was riding high. The Macintosh was just out: the 128K and 512K versions. And I lusted after one. The Mac Plus came out in ’86.

Fast forward to now… 20 years later, as I said.

Apple is well underway to regaining it’s former glory. The Mac is doing well, quite smoothly undergoing it’s second architectural refactoring. And I very happily have a houseful of macs of various vintages, dating from an SE FDHD through to a Aluminum Powerbook G4.

I still work as a programmer, but more often I work *with* programmers to help them improve there skills & practices.

Now what languages are in use? Well, there’s still C around, but C++ seems to have largely replaced it. Java is the king of the hill. What’s Java? Oh, it’s like a cleaned up C++ with seatbelts & airbags. The new kid on the block is C#, which is a not so nicely cleaned up C++ with seatbelts & airbags. Ruby is taking much of the industry by storm… re-raising the banner of dynamic languages.

And there’s Smalltalk… modern, sophisticated, and up to date compared with it’s predecessor of 20 years ago… but basically the same. You know what they say: quality endures. OO is still hot, not so new, but still hardly anyone really knows it. What do I tell people who want to learn what OO really is? I tell them to learn Smalltalk.

Some might be wondering about my “new” fascination with Smalltalk, given that all my writing & posting pretty much deals with Java. My involvement with Smalltalk is anything but new. For those that are interested… here’s a summary of my history with Smalltalk.

It started, as I suspect it did for many, with the Aug ’81 issue of Byte magazine (a reasonably good condition copy of which has been on my shelf since I acquired it in the mid-80s). I was heir to a large collection of BYTEs and found that gem (among many others) buried in the pile.

I devoured the Smalltalk articles, and immediately started putting the concepts to use in my programming, which at the time was in assembly and C on Apple ][s and early IBM PCs.

In 88 I headed off (belatedly) to University. Acadia University, to be precise, which many of you will know in relation to Ivan Tomek. At one point after I had finished my time there, Ivan taught Smalltalk to freshmen CS students. With administrations changes and such, that bit of enlightenment didn’t last long and afaik it’s been Java for many years now .

During my first year at Acadia, in “Data Structures and Algorithms” we were using Turbo Pascal. I had my own PC, and bought a copy of TP for use in my dorm room. I kept getting the upgrades and before long version 5.5 came out. It was object oriented!! I immediately began putting into practice all the ideas and concepts that had been gleaned from the BYTE articles. It wasn’t Smalltalk, but it was OO.

I did several assignments using and learning OO hands on. It was fun times. I progressed to C++ for a while… all the while wanting to have a chance to use Smalltalk.

I had my chance at University of Calgary, for my graduate work. I picked up a used Sun 3 workstation and my supervisor got me a copy of ObjectWorks Rel 4. I was in nirvana. Mind you , my understanding of OO was immature at the time, but Smalltalk was everything I could have wanted it to be.

While finishing grad school I had a job as a developer in a Smalltalk shop. We used Digitalk Smalltalk/V to develop a line of shrinkwrapped CD-ROM based edutainment products (here’s one example). This was ~ 1994… 4x CD-ROM drives were just coming out, and our target machine was a 386 with 8M of RAM.

A couple of startups later I was again working in Smalltalk (which is what lured me away from the previous job)… VisualWorks this time. Much nicer than Digitalk’s. After a year or so there it was off to the desolate wastes of Java for some time.. with occasional bursts of bliss on my own time with VisualWorks and later Squeak.

I just pushed version 0.10 of sSpec to the Cincom public store. It includes several small tweaks as well as support for ordering mock expectations.

A first pass at a reference manual is forthcoming shortly.