From ScotLUG

Greg Lewin on "Squeak Smalltalk"

1930, Thursday December 4th 2008

Squeak is a modern, open source full-featured implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment.

The Squeak talk will cover an introduction to the language itself, and to the environment, showing some of the many tools available within it for coding, testing and debugging, and examination of objects in the system.

I will also introduce some of the potentially very useful projects which have been implemented in Squeak, such as Seaside, Croquet, Scratch, Sophie, and EToys.

Smalltalk was the first pure Object-Oriented language: Alan Kay, the originator of it, coined the term 'Object-Oriented'.

Squeak was derived from the original public release of Smalltalk-80, with many additions and enhancements from the 1990s to the present.

Smalltalk (Squeak) is much more than just a language - it is also a GUI + an IDE + debugger + class libraries + many utilities + many packages and projects.

Seaside is a web application server allowing HTML pages to be generated on demand, so that what is seen in the web browser is a reflection of a running program, rather than static pages prepared or generated beforehand. This allows web applications using it to be dynamic and interactive. It is seen by the Rails community as one of the few rivals to Rails. state: released and usable at v 2.9

Croquet is a framework for building peer-to-peer collaborative 3D environments. It offers the possibility of building open sourced virtual worlds which are not dependent on proprietary code or centralized servers, and which may scale well over many hosts. state: alpha

Scratch is a programming environment for children, using plug-in components. state: released at v 1.3

Sophie is an authoring and display system for electronic books allowing full multimedia. state: released at v 1.0

EToys is an exploratory scripting environment mainly aimed at children, allowing production of games and simulations as an aid to learning. state: released as part of the standard Squeak image.

I hope you will find it amusing. There ought to be something of interest to most, and may provide some extra Christmas entertainment for kids of all ages.