The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, June 30th.
Hernan Wilkinson will talk about his LiveTyping project.
Currently, almost all mainstream dynamically typed languages support type annotation a la Strongtalk. Python calls it "type hints", TypeScript is JavaScript+type annotations, PHP calls it "type declarations" and Ruby does it through a tool called Sorbet. All of them annotate the types in the source code and it is the programmer who must write and maintain the annotation. In all cases, it is not mandatory for the system to correctly type check for it to run.
LiveTyping is a type system proposal for Smalltalk, that seeks similar objectives but implemented in a different way. First, it is the environment itself that collects and maintains the types based on the execution of the system, not the programmer. Second, the types are not interleaved in the source code, thus maintaining the syntax and simplicity of the language. And finally, the main objective is not to carry out a static type checking (although it supports it), but to augment the programmers experience increasing the usability of current tools such as searching for senders and implementers, and performing more accurate and safe refactorings.
In this talk Hernan will briefly show how LiveTyping is implemented to later concentrate on the improvements made to the tools and the benefits it brings when developing software with Smalltalk.
LiveTyping is currently implemented in Cuis Smalltalk and has been successfully used for the last two years in three different universities in Argentina when teaching Object Oriented Programming and Design.
Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, 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 the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!
Update 27 August 2021: The recording of the presentation is now available on Vimeo.
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