This is a good read. I’m happy to see Smalltalk mentioned a few times!
Tag: Smalltalk
Smalltalk Jobs Blog
Here is James’s new Smalltalk Jobs Blog: http://SmalltalkJobs.com
Thanks to James, Niall and Bruce for maintaining the blog!
Pharocloud – Pharo Smalltalk Platform as a Service
Yay! Pharo Smalltalk now has a Platform as a Service provider (PaaS)! Pharocloud offers Pharo Smalltalk hosting starting at just $2 per month! Amazing! I’m so thrilled to hear about it.
Check it out at: http://pharocloud.com/
Smalltalk Job Posting
Just saw this Smalltalk job posting on LinkedIn. Good to see some Smalltalk hiring going on!
STIC 2013 – Smalltalk Industry Conference
More info on the 2013 Smalltalk Industry Conference in Arizona is here: http://www.stic.st/conferences/stic13/
Yay! 30 yrs of Smalltalk!
Smalltalk Jobs
Now that DabbleDb.com is gone (a year ago), and the Smalltalk jobs page that was at smalltalkjobs.dabbledb.com
is gone as well, where will Smalltalk jobs get posted from now on? I recently removed my Smalltalk jobs page as well because it wasn’t used very much. Usually when I get an email for a Smalltalk job, I tell the recruiter to try posting it to comp.lang.smalltalk. Any other suggestions?
Cincom is hiring a Smalltalk development manager
Check out the job posting here. Good Luck to Alan Knight as he moves over to Google!
Cuis Smalltalk
I haven’t been paying enough attention lately. I just found out that Juan Vuletich has created Cuis Smalltalk. It uses the Squeak vm but is pretty darn small. I haven’t played around with it yet but it seems cool. If you check it out, let me know what you think about it.
A Smalltalker’s impression of Ruby
I’ve been using Ruby now for over half a year so I feel like I have a big enough time sample to be able to roll up my impressions of Ruby from a Smalltalker’s perspective.
Ruby the language was easy to learn. I knew Smalltalk, Java, C# and various other languages. The syntax is like Java. The concepts are like Smalltalk. It wasn’t much of a transition at all.
The IDEs are bad. Working in a text editor is skinny but the different between skinny and naked isn’t much. I also use Eclipse with the Aptana plugin loaded and that makes Eclipse only slightly better for Ruby development. Senders, references, implementers are all missing. File search feels like a step back to the C# style of development. Ugh.
Documentation is good but… I miss using the code as documentation like you do in Smalltalk. I don’t want to go look at the Rubydoc website to see how to read a file. Instead, like I would in Smalltalk, I want to look at the implementation of File.new() and then find senders of it to get examples. All in the same code. Still, the documentation is pretty good.
Scripting is easy with Ruby. It should be but that doesn’t always mean much. In Ruby’s case, it really is easy to write scripts without a big IDE in your way.
There are too many ways to do the same thing. One of the things I hate most about Ruby is that there are several ways to do everything. This makes it easy to write code the way you want. It also makes your code messy as different developers write different sections of the code using completely different syntax styles. Yuk.
Libraries in Ruby are similar to Smalltalk or Java. Rake (like make). UnitTest (like SUnit or JUnit).
Debugging in Ruby is terrible. I haven’t found a interactive debugger. Debugging via print statements is like working 20 years ago – it works but not nearly as well as using a good interactive debugger.
Airflowing – New Seaside Application
Checkout airflowing.com a new Seaside application written in Pharo. The site allows you to organize all your creative work in one place including sales, tasks and finances. I haven’t tried it out but if you do, please post a reply here with a review to let us know what you think about it.