[ UK Smalltalk User Group ]

For our holiday meeting, Simberon 's David Buck will present Beagle Smalltalk. Over the past 8 years, David has been developing a Smalltalk virtual machine. He used it to release two Smalltalk Games written in VisualWorks to run on Andriod and iPhone devices. More recently, he's re-written the VM to use its own bytecode set and written his own Smalltalk compiler to make it a stand-alone 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 Latta.

Dave Mason has been a professor of Computer Science at Toronto Metropolitan University (previously known as Ryerson) for 41 years. He has done research on operating systems, software reliability and programming languages. Current research is mostly around Smalltalk and other dynamic languages. If forced to program very low level projects such as virtual machines, he is willing to use Zig or Rust, but for any other purpose, he insists on using higher productivity languages - primarily Smalltalk. Zag Smalltalk is a principle-based Smalltalk VM. "Principled" means that the only 3 operations are: message send, assignment, and return. 1) it is designed from the ground up to use multi-processing, to leverage multi-core systems. 2) There is no special-casing of methods like ifTrue:ifFalse or whileTrue:, although of course some methods are implemented by primitive methods. It does aggressive inlining of methods and blocks. 3) “Source” code is maintained as ASTs. 4) Compiled code ru

For this month's meeting, we'll take it easy and have an online social! Bring your favourite drinks - beer, coffee, or whatever you prefer! 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. Update 26 February 2022: Aik-Siong Koh's presentation on digital twins using Smalltalk is now available on Vimeo .

After a two year pause, the ESUG conference returned this past summer when Smalltalkers from all over the world met in Novi Sad, Serbia for a week of presentations, and socials. For this month's meeting, we'll have an open discussion about what was presented at the conference. If you've been there, join us to tell us what you liked, and why. If you could not go, join us and discover what went down in Novi Sad! 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!

For this month, we'll be welcoming Instantiations ' Mariano Martinez Peck and Seth Berman, who will be talking to us about asynchronous programming in Smalltalk. Whether you’re interested in starting a new project or enhancing an existing system, asynchronous programming offers a great way to optimize application speed and help ensure maintainability as complexity increases. We’ll discuss the asynchronous programming approach, why it’s important, and show live demos in the VAST Platform of how to get started with futures/promises, asynchronous streams/zones, and more! Mariano Martinez Peck is a senior systems engineer specializing in dynamic programming language software. In 2018, he joined Instantiations to further develop the VAST Platform through the addition of new frameworks, libraries and tools, as well as improving the existing code base of VAST. He is active in the Smalltalk development community, and has used his expertise to co-author numerous open source projects.

For this month's meeting, we'll open the floor to the whole audience and let people show what they are working on. If you have an interesting project to show, or if you'd like to get some help with some hard problem, just show up and be ready to present! 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 17 February 2023 : The recording of this session are now available on Vimeo: Tim Rowledge - Home weather station using Squeak and MQTT - 27 July 2022 Christian Haider - Porting PDFTalk - 27 July 2022 Oleksandr Kryvonos - Lisperanto - 27 July 2022 Tim Rowledge - Text To Software - 27 July 2022 Dave Mason - Camp Smalltalk Supreme + NA Smalltalk 2023 + Zag Smalltalk - 27 July 2023 Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas - MiniDocs: minimal documentation approaches - 27 July 2022 Hernán Wilkinson - Inline Method Refactor

 For our June meeting, Merik Voswinkel will give us a presentation on Smalltalk and Self hardware with a focus on manycore parallelism and distributed computing. This follows from Jecel Assumpcao Jr's SiliconSqueak presentation at the California Smalltalkers meetup . Merik will bring us on a tour past 50 years of late bound message passing Smalltalk VMs, Smalltalk RISC processors, David Ungar’s RoarVM, adaptive compilers, concurrent aggregates, clone-reduce, a processor per object, FPGA’s, Morphle Logic, Croquet and Teatime , Wafer Scale Integration, hundred (M1 Ultra), thousands and million cores ASICs, Cuniform, Matroshca Brains and much more in our tourney towards the Wayne Gretzky invention game of inventing the future. If there is time we’ll go burning the Smalltalk disk packs, the intergalactic network GUI and the destiny of computers as intellectual amplifiers for humans pervasively networked worldwide and how we are going to communicate with Aliens. Merik Voswinkel is an i

For our May meeting, Object Guild's Jonathan van Alteren and Erik Stel will give us a preview of Expressive Systems. Expressive Systems is a framework inspired by Richard Pawson's work on Naked Objects . It allows Object Guild to rapidly develop flexible applications by focusing on the design of behaviorally complete objects in the business domain. By using a novel web application architecture based on CodeParadise , it allows direct manipulation of business objects by the user. The goal of the framework is to better support problem solving activities and to empower users by giving them a first-person experience. The framework is currently in a (private) alpha phase of development. There are plans to open source the framework in the future. Jonathan has been developing business applications for various Dutch companies since 2001, in roles varying from programmer to solution architect. In 2018, he got hooked on Pharo/Smalltalk and never looked back. Erik has developed both techn

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be held on Wednesday, April 27th 2022. Newspeak is a programming system in the Smalltalk tradition, whose current incarnation runs in the web browser.  Newspeak is designed to provide the liveness Smalltalkers expect, as well as features atypical of Smalltalk such as modularity, security and good interoperability with the surrounding ecosystem.  In this talk, we'll explain how and why Newspeak differs from Smalltalk and demonstrate the Newspeak IDE. Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language and a well known researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. He was awarded the senior Dahl-Nygaard prize in 2017. He is currently a Technical Fellow at F5 , and has held positions at Google, SAP Labs, Cadence, and Sun. He has authored or co-authored several books including the Java Language and Virtual Machine Specifications , and the Dart Programming Language .   Prior to joining Sun, he worked o

 The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be held on Wednesday, March 30th 2022. Come to hear news about Glamorous Toolkit, the moldable development environment. We were busy over the past year: beside everything else, GT also became a multi-language notebook + programmable knowledge management platform. By this we unify the flows of programming, data science and knowledge management. And there might be a couple of other surprises, too. Tudor Gîrba is a software environmentalist and CEO of feenk.com where he works with an amazing team to make the inside of systems explainable. Much of the work is embodied in Glamorous Toolkit ( gtoolkit.com ), a novel environment that enables Moldable Development.  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 4 June 2022: The recording of Tudor's presentation and o

For this month's meeting, we'll open the floor to the whole audience and let people show what they are working on. If you have an interesting project to show, or if you'd like to get some help with some hard problem, just show up and be ready to present! 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 29 May 2022: The recording of this session are now available on Vimeo: Steven Travis Pope - Resurrecting Score-11 Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas - Pharo powered data stories with Lepiter Sean DeNigris - A Glamorous Toolkit-based Dynabook   Ken Dickey - Nested morph coordinate systems in Cuis David Buck - PigeonTalk   Torsten Bergmann - Nucleus + OJO Tim Rowledge - MQTT and Smalltalk   Keith Holman - Profiling Pharo code using flame graphs

For our January meeting, we'll be hosting GemTalk 's Martin McClure who will talk about a new Smalltalk IDE - Sparkle. If you're setting out to develop a Smalltalk IDE from scratch, what design decisions do you make? You'd love to "fix" the things that have long annoyed you in existing IDEs, but new designs risk creating their own novel annoyances. The Sparkle project-in-progress is creating a new and not entirely conventional development environment for GemStone Smalltalk. Come see factors that have influenced its design, get a demo of the current state of the tools, learn about the project's next steps, and share *your* IDE annoyances. Martin heard about Smalltalk in 1975, *finally* got his hands on a running Smalltalk system ten years later, and hasn't let go since. In his 25 years on the GemStone team, Martin has worked on many aspects - some VM internals, some user interface design, but mostly all the things that go in between. In his rare spare t