[ UK Smalltalk User Group ]

Join us for this special off-cycle event to celebrate the new release of Squeak 6.1! More than four years in the making, the new release brings a new tree browser, the return of "The Worlds of Squeak" from 2004, and many other new features and improvements across the system. Rather than a regular presentation, this will be an informal online release party. We'll take a tour through some of the highlights of 6.1, hear from Squeak contributors about their favorite changes, and leave plenty of room to chat about the present, past, and future of Squeak. Also, we'd love to see what YOU are doing with Squeak! If you want, bring a short demo along (max. 5 min) and show us your work. New tools, shaky experiments, and works in progress are all welcome. Come celebrate the release, meet fellow Squeakers, and see what's new in the world of Squeak! Original release announcement on squeak-dev: https://lists.squeakfoundation.org/archives/list/squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.or...

  Much of today's software is locked inside large, evolving code bases where the original design has gradually been lost. What if we could automatically recover that design, represent it using a language-independent application model, and then allow a modern runtime to render, evolve and maintain the application independently of its original implementation language? This talk presents that vision through  SecureCell , a secure communications appliance developed by XTC Mobile for organizations that require privacy, security and local control. I'll demonstrate how  Graphify  analyzes existing applications to recover their architectural structure, how this information is transformed into the SageTea Canonical Application Model, and how the runtime can automatically generate user interfaces, navigation and application behavior from that model. Rather than treating software as language-specific source code, the emphasis is on recovering and preserving the application's se...

At ESUG 2025, Hera  was introduced as a BDD framework bringing full Gherkin expressiveness to Pharo. Since then, Hera has evolved significantly — both as a framework and as a tool adopted in real-world industrial settings. After a brief introduction to Gherkin for writing given-when-then scenarios, various aspects of Hera will be highlighted. A functional overview will set the scene, followed by a dive into the code to show how Hera maps Gherkin features and scenarios to Smalltalk classes and methods. During a live demo, example Gherkin scenarios for a simple Pharo Spec application will be written to explain the full scenario development cycle. Koen De Hondt has used Smalltalk since 1988, first as a student, then as an academic researcher, and then in industry. He holds a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (1998). In the nineties and a few years after the turn of the century, he was one of the driving forces behind the Belgian Smalltalk User Group (BSUG)....

 Coypu and Phausto are two Pharo packages offering respectively a DSL and an API that turn the Pharo IDE into a music and sound design environment. They enable on-the-fly music composition, pattern sequencing, and DSP (Digital Signal Processing) programming. Born as a solo project and free, open source alternative to Symbolic Sound Kyma, they have been subsequently funded by the Pharo Association and Inria. Coypu , deeply inspired by Tidal Cycles, handles musical pattern creation and playback across different audio servers. Phausto  provides an interface for programming synthesizers and audio processing via an embedded Faust compiler, with Bloc widgets that make it easy to display and control synthesis parameters. Phausto can also be used to develop audio plugins thanks to its JUCE and Cmajor exporters. Live performances with both tools have demonstrated that Pharo can handle real-time music and sound design reliably, with solid timing and no audio glitches. Domenico Cipriani ...

Diálogo is a desktop tool that lets children aged 10–17 create their own videogames by combining drawn characters with a set of visual icons — no typing required. The icons compose like cards, activating behaviours in the drawn objects and naturally leading kids through concepts such as categories, rules, recursion, and metaprogramming. In this talk I'll show how Smalltalk's live, image-based environment made it uniquely suited for building Diálogo. I'll give a demo of the app, walk through some implementation metrics, and discuss the pedagogical ideas behind the project — including a free 7-class course I've shared online and workshops I've run open to the community at the Faculty of Exact Sciences (UBA). Agustín Martínez is a developer and researcher at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), and the creator of Diálogo, a programming environment for children built in Cuis Smalltalk. He presented a paper on Diálogo at the Onward! track of OOPSLA, and has given publ...

Smalltalk environments have long been pioneers in developer productivity. With the VAST Platform AI Assistant, Instantiations is extending that tradition by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) directly into the VAST platform. This new tool is designed to bring AI capabilities directly into your daily workflow. In this session, Johan, Kris, and Mariano will share a user experience report and a live demonstration of the assistant’s current capabilities, powered by Google’s Gemini. You’ll see how it goes beyond simple chat by directly interacting with the live VAST image through the LLM’s “tools” capabilities. This allows investigating source code as it responds to your questions. These examples will demonstrate how the VAST Platform AI Assistant leverages the live nature of Smalltalk to act as a true pair programmer. We’ll also look ahead at our enterprise-focused roadmap, including support for local models to ensure privacy and security, integration with additional LLM providers, a...

Introducing VEO: A Live Visual Smalltalk that reimagines what a Smalltalk programming environment can be. VEO enables direct visual manipulation of any object and the creation of windowless visual interfaces. It is built around four core principles: all objects are visual; a single infinite zoomable and pannable canvas serves as the workspace; code can be written "in the air" anywhere in that space to send, evaluate and animate messages and live expressions; and live expressions can freely combine symbols, literals and live object references. Adrian Soma began his professional programming career in 1987, with a longstanding focus on the fundamental challenges of programming itself — particularly user interface design and interaction. He first encountered Smalltalk in 1996 and has worked with it ever since. An early project that would prove formative was an interactive chess course application, for which he built a custom graphical object system from scratch. That system becam...

 This talk explores what it means to work with AI from inside a live Pharo system rather than treating AI as an external chatbot. I will demonstrate experiments where AI models are invoked directly from the Playground, including a concrete implementation of conversation history (AIAHistory) and experiments across multiple models and providers. Rather than focusing on code generation, the emphasis is on workflows: how different conversation structures affect results, how styles and constraints can be imposed on generated comments, and how AI systems can be inspected for systematic errors and limitations. Examples include documentation support, UML generation (via PlantUML), and experiments in automated paper review. The talk is experimental in nature and rooted in Smalltalk’s strengths: reflection, live objects, and tools that are part of the system rather than bolted on. The goal is not to present a finished framework, but to share concrete insights, failures, and possibilities for...

For our last 2025 meeting, Norbert Hartl will present Soil - an object oriented database implemented in Pharo. Soil is an object oriented database implemented completely in smalltalk/pharo. It makes it easy to build a persistent solution without the burden of mapping everything to some external DSL/database. It supports storing arbitrary graphs and enables transparent access to them. It has binary search indexes to make lookups of huge collections quite efficient. It is the main database behind ApptiveGrid - low code tool to build business processes. Norbert Hartl is an experienced software engineer and entrepreneur with a strong track record of delivering business projects and developing key libraries and frameworks. As the co-founder of ApptiveGrid and PharoPro, he focuses on creating efficient, zero-dependency software solutions that drive business innovation and streamline operations. This will be an online meeting. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in ad...

For our October meeting, Hernán Wilkinson and Juan Vuletich will tell us about recent developments in Cuis Smalltalk . These range from kernel functionality like Ephemerons and the Sista Bytecodes set to app developer tools like a visual GUI Designer and additional Layout policies. Hernán Wilkinson Passionate programmer. Smalltalk lover. Founder of 10Pines and FAST (Argentine Foundation of Smalltalk). Professor of the FCEyN at the UBA. Teaches OO and Agile techniques at the university and the industry. Key Note Speaker of many national and international conferences. Contributes to many Smalltalk opensource projects. Promotes self organized organizations and agile methodologies. You can follow him in Twitter at @hernanwilkinson Juan Vuletich Juan Vuletich is the founder and lead developer of Cuis Smalltalk. He is a long-standing Open Source Smalltalk community member, having contributed kernel code to Cuis, Squeak and the OpenSmalltalk VM for over 25 years. Juan has been...

Earlier this year, the Pharo development team announced the availability of Pharo 13 . For our September 2025 meeting, Pharo's release manager Esteban Lorenzano will give us a tour of the new version - what's changed, and what remains the same. Esteban Lorenzano studied Computer Sciences at Universidad de Buenos Aires, and worked since 1994 in several object-oriented and low-level technologies, in different software companies, serving in various positions from programmer to senior architect. In 2007 he co-founded Smallworks to offer Pharo-based agile development projects. Since 2012 he dedicated full time to developing the Pharo code and community. He works with the INRIA-EVREF team in Lille, France, as core developer for Pharo, being responsible with the coordination of new releases and the implementation and maintenance of several Pharo libraries. This will be an online meeting. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's  Meetup pa...

For our August presentation, Newspeak 's creator Gilad Bracha will share some recent developments in Newspeak. All Newspeak applications now support interactive online collaboration out of the box. No programming is required to enable this. We utilize the Croquet system to support this, but use it in a unique way, so that no special programming is required. Instead, we leverage Newspeak's class hierarchy inheritance and platform objects so that all Croquet adaptation is done automatically. This is an interim step toward Newspeak's long-standing goal of orthogonal synchronization. We'll explain what all this means, show how it's done, and speculate on next steps. This will be an online meeting. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's  Meetup page  to receive the meeting details. Update 19 September 2025 : The recording of Gilad's presentation is now available on Youtube:

This April, the UKSTUG will be hosting Pharo's Esteban Lorenzano to talk about Pharo-CIG - a C++ Interface Generator. The Pharo FFI (Foreign Function Interface) system is an excellent tool that enables Pharo users to create bindings with external C libraries. However, there's a significant drawback that often discourages its use: the bindings must be manually created, a process that can be slow and prone to crashes. Pharo-CIG proposes a solution to bridge that gap. Esteban Lorenzano studied Computer Sciences at Universidad de Buenos Aires, and worked since 1994 in several object-oriented and low-level technologies, in different software companies, serving in various positions from programmer to senior architect. In 2007 he co-founded Smallworks to offer Pharo-based agile development projects. Since 2012 he dedicated full time to developing the Pharo code and community. He works with the INRIA-EVREF team in Lille, France, as core developer for Pharo, being responsi...

For our March meeting, Craig Latta will show how to leverage AI language models in a livecoding environment. Using a tool creates context for complimentary tools. For example, selecting an object in a Smalltalk inspector creates useful context for browsing the class of that object. This is a potent idea in an integrated development environment, where multiple tools operate on related information. The extensive context in a live environment enables powerful collaboration with contemporary AI language models. Tools built from that collaboration could greatly augment human capability. Craig Latta will show some foundations for them, and suggest ways of easing their construction through the systematic description of existing tool functionality. For a preview, please see Craig's blog at thiscontext.com . Craig Latta is a research computer scientist in Berkeley and Amsterdam, with interests including livecoding, music performance, and interactive visualization. The discover...

For our February 2025 presentation, Richard Ronteltap will present his SmallJS project. SmallJS is a free and open source implementation of the elegant and powerful Smalltalk-80 (ST) language. It compiles to JavaScript (JS) that runs in modern browsers or in Node.js. SmallJS is file based, not image based, so you can develop in your favorite IDE. The default setup is for Visual Studio Code, with ST syntax coloring and step debugging! You code separately from the SmallJS base libraries (image) and only the parts you use are imported automatically when running your app. SmallJS is fully object oriented, so customizable on every level. For usability, ST class and method names are kept mostly equal to their familiar JS counterparts. JS libraries already encapsulated in ST are: Browsers: Document, Window, HTML elements, events, CSS, streams. Node.js: HTTP server, Express, 4 databases, files. SmallJS is mostly intended for use by JS devs that want a nicer language to work in...

For our first meeting of the year, we'll hold a retrospective on what has happened in the Smalltalk world in 2024, and discuss what we can expect in 2025. Join us to share what you learned, and what you are looking forward to! 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!  

Join us next Wednesday for an engaging double presentation on innovative advancements in Smalltalk programming: ### 1. SemanticText: Improving Exploratory Programming in Squeak with Generative AI Presenter: Christoph Thiede From autocomplete to conversational agents, AI is transforming how we interact with code. Christoph will introduce SemanticText , a framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) into Squeak/Smalltalk, enabling conversational agents, semantic search tools, and retrieval-augmented generation workflows. He will showcase experimental integrations with Squeak’s tools and present the concept of a semantic exploratory programming system for debugging and exploring systems using natural language. Bio: Christoph Thiede is a member of HPI’s Software Architecture Group and a core developer of Squeak/Smalltalk, with a focus on enhancing developer productivity and tools. *** ### 2. Webside: A Unified HTTP API for Smalltalk Presenter: Guillermo Amaral ...

Meeting Announcement Date: Wednesday, 30th October 2024 Time: 7:00 PM GMT Join us for an engaging session on the latest in Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), featuring two insightful presentations. Introduction to Large Language Models and Gloodata Speaker: Mariano Guerra Mariano will walk us through the fundamentals of LLMs and provide a behind-the-scenes look at building the Gloodata application. A Unique Perspective on LLMs Speaker: Tudor Girba Tudor will offer a distinct view on LLMs, showcasing demos based on GT that highlight their innovative approach. We look forward to your participation! [1] https://gloodata.com [2] https://feenk.com  Update 8 January 2025: The recordings of the presentations are now available on YouTube:  

How values make systems simpler Distinguishing between stateful Objects and Values has long been recognized as fruitful. Values are universal context-free abstractions that prevent side-effects and allow for a functional programming style. Though programming languages provide simple Values like Integer and String, more complex Values are usually not supported. We show how to model complex structures as Values in Smalltalk, which allows for a simple and versatile implementation. The resulting Smalltalk systems are simple, clear and easily testable. Christian Haider  is the author of the  PDFtalk  library used in  smallCharts  and other projects. Underlying is a simple implementation of  Values  which he uses extensibly. Christian will show how Values make systems simpler and easier. Examples for some uses and the limits of the approach will be discussed. Since Values use only standard Smalltalk features, it can be used in most other Smalltalks. And all ...

 Egg is a new Smalltalk dialect that was designed from scratch to incorporate some interesting features: A module system with namespaces that replaces the old-good Smalltalk global. Dynamic identifiers, which are bound lazily similarly to how methods are lazily bound. A multi-VM architecture, with different VM implementations written in C++, Pharo, JavaScript and Egg. The Egg-in-Egg VM is special in that the VM component is just another module of the system, creating what we have named Live Metacircular Runtimes (LMRs) [1]. The most interesting characteristic of LMRs in Smalltalk is that they can be developed using standard Smalltalk tools, which shorten feedback loops when doing VM development. During the talk I'll show a little bit about Egg and its LMR, and how not only VM developers get more productive when writing VMs, but also application developers can better understand what the VM does behind the scenes. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.16973 - Live Objects All Th...