I spent a week in Lille, France, where the European Smalltalk User Group conference (ESUG) was held at Inria/Lille University. This was in parallel to the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies (IWST). Lille is a beautiful city with historic Art Nouveau and Victorian era districts, but also stylish modern developments. It has a mix of northern French and Belgian culture, food and drink.
Despite the age of Smalltalk, it is still one of the purest, most productive and cleanest languages and tool environments for doing complex stuff reliably. We have used it in our tool development since the mid 90’s and see no reason to change.
ESUG brought the community together across Europe, but also the Americas and even a couple of Africans. A great deal of innovative work was on show and there is no shortage of interesting products, libraries, techniques and evolution to address new computing models and requirements. Standout items for me included:
Continuing rapid development of the Glamorous Toolkit platform by Feenk which now hosts multiple development languages seamlessly, integrates with the Gemstone Object database and AI language models and allows developers to extend the tool itself with minimal effort
Multiple Smalltalks that will run in the browser, either targeting the Javascript VM, transpiling to Javascript, compiling to web assembly, or running on smalltalk specific browser plugin VMs.
High quality, cross platform modern widgets and controls via Toplo, which leverages BLOCK and supports SPEC 2.0 UIs
Many projects which target and improve testing, debugging and monitoring
Support for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
The usual rapid evolution of major implementations such as Pharo (open source) and VAST (proprietary). Key themes include Unicode, stability, performance and interoperability
Work which is keeping up with latest developments in virtual machines, memory management, garbage collection, just in time compilation and other techniques required for robust, scalable and performant systems
In the IWST workshop, I presented a paper on the work Gareth Cox and I did on creating a Graphical Language Server in Smalltalk (previously only done in Java and TypeScript). Glad to say this achieved an award for innovation and 3rd rank overall, which was pleasing for a modelling oriented paper in a primarily computer science workshop.
In the paper we were able to show how working at a higher level of abstraction and in a dynamic language allowed us to do more than the reference implementation in a fraction of the source code and memory footprint. You can view the presentation or read the paper.
Thanks to all the organisers for a great conference and workshop.