[ UK Smalltalk User Group ]

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 1 January 2025: The recording of the presentation is now available on YouTube:  

 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 S...