[ UK Smalltalk User Group ]

For our June meeting, Simberon 's David Buck will present Beagle Smalltalk. Over the past 8 years, David has been developing a Smalltalk virtual machine and image. He used it to release two Smalltalk Games which ran on Andriod and iPhone devices. More recently, he's re-written the VM to use a new bytecode set and re-written the Smalltalk compiler with a new framework to make a new Smalltalk environment called Beagle Smalltalk named after the ship that took Darwin on his voyage of discovery. David plans to release this as an open-source Smalltalk to help and encourage kids to explore the world of programming. In this talk, David presents the current status of the project and where he hopes to go with it. David Buck is the president of Simberon - a company that has been providing Smalltalk training and consulting for over 25 years. Along with James Robertson, David produced the Industry Misinterpretations podcast and later the Smalltalk Reflections podcast with Craig Latt

  For our May presentation, Stephane Ducasse will present the vision behind Pharo and how that is been implemented incrementally across multiple releases. In Stef's words: "The vision of Pharo is based on three pillars: - First we want to make sure that Pharo is used to develop complex and robust systems (by complex we means multiple millions lines of code or objects). - Second we want Pharo to be a modular system that can be versatile (Pharo on iot, on large servers, in the web browser….) - Third Pharo should be an evolvable system that can adapt to new needs (modular tools, first class slot, new debuggers, packages…). Sometimes it can be unclear that we follow this vision but over the years we are delivering this vision and we will continue. In this talk I will briefly recall the vision behind Pharo and show the achievements so far. I will show that our development is heavily backed by tests. In the second part of the talk I will focus on the current effort to improve the us

For this month's online presentation, Yoshiki Ohshima will demonstrate the Croquet Microverse , which is a 3D collaborative construction environment. It is an incarnation of Smalltalk-based Croquet but instead implemented in JavaScript. Microverse allows a group of users to collaboratively create new objects in a virtual space, and describe their behaviors in the live programming manner that can be used by professional programmers. The object extension mechanism used in the Microverse is heavily influenced by past class and object extension mechanisms, many of which originated from experimentation and implementation in Smalltalk. Likewise, the architecture of the Microverse application framework draws upon other frameworks such as Morphic and AppKit. Yoshiki will explain the connections between those systems and the Microverse. Yoshiki joined Walt Disney Imagineering R&D in 2000 as an intern while attending the graduate school of Tokyo Institute of Technology, and helped devel

This month's online meeting introduces a new format whereby we'll give space to commercial companies to discuss how they make use of Smalltalk and contribute to the Smalltalk community. The first of this series will be Mercap Software , represented by Gabriel Cotelli, Inés Sosa, Iván Boaretto, Matías Fernandez, and Maximiliano Tabacman. During this talk, Mercap will showcase five of their solutions designed for different types of investors. They will shed light on how Mercap benefits from the open-source projects maintained by the Buenos Aires Smalltalk group on GitHub. They will share with you how they use these freely available frameworks to interact with databases, operate on math and time units, create custom CSS, declare interactions on web applications, display complex charts, manage application startup, and streamline the creation of Docker images. Gabriel Cotelli is a CS bachelor, continuous learner & free-thinker. Supporter of libre knowledge, human intelligence au

WebAssembly (WASM) is an instruction format for portable high-performance code, run by a stack-based virtual machine. To Smalltalkers, this sounds very familiar. WASM is supported by the three most popular web browsers, and by other host platforms as well. Perhaps we can translate certain Smalltalk compiled methods to WASM, augmenting our support for physical processors and for livecoding the Web. For our February meeting, Craig Latta will describe his initial experiments, using the Epigram compilation framework. Craig Latta is a research computer scientist in Berkeley and Amsterdam, with interests including livecoding, music performance, and interactive visualization. The discovery of a mysteriously-placed copy of the Blue Book at university led to stints at several exploratory labs, and a pursuit of improvisation wherever code is found. This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's  Meetup page  to receive th

For our first online meeting of the year, Stéphane Rollandin will talk to us about muO: musical objects for Squeak . The presentation will focus on some of the interactive tools and subsystems widely used in muO, that are of interest in their own right, and potentially useful to others. The main emphasis will be on the large family of zoomable fields, which are modular plotting editors. Stéphane will demonstrate the workflow they are designed for, and show in what sense it is a seamless and natural exploitation of the Morphic framework. The code for these tools is somewhat entangled with the muO package, so Stéphane will also provide a Squeak image taylored to help people find their way there. Stéphane Rollandin has been doing independent research on software for musical composition and representation for the last 20 years, during his whole careeer as a stay-at-home father. After developing the GeoMaestro system for KeyKit, and the Csound-x package for Emacs, he was introduced to Small