This week's community meeting

[Bates, Simon]

At standup this morning, Dana was asking if there would be good places to read more about the Smalltalk programming language.

Dan Ingalls' article "Design Principles Behind Smalltalk" is a very nice overview of some of the forces and motivations in the design of the language:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html

In terms of introductions to the actual language itself, it's a little harder to find satisfying online material. The best resource, I think, is the book "Smalltalk-80: The Language And Its Implementation". A scanned PDF is available online and the first few chapters introduce the language:

http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pdf

There is a quite nice "Terse Guide to Squeak" (the Smalltalk version I will demo today) but it's not an intro or tutorial:

http://squeak.org/documentation/terse_guide/

If I find other good resources, I'll definitely pass them along. (For those at IDRC in person, I brought in my copy of the Smalltalk-80 book, if you're interested in taking a look.)

Simon
________________________________________
From: fluid-work [fluid-work-bounces at lists.idrc.ocad.ca] on behalf of Bates, Simon [sbates at ocadu.ca]
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2015 8:47 AM
To: Fluid Work ‎[fluid-work at fluidproject.org]‎
Subject: This week's community meeting

Hi everyone,

For this week's community meeting, we are going to continue with our series on Case Studies of User Creativity. On Wednesday we will have a look at Smalltalk and other work of Alan Kay and his collaborators.

I'd like to suggest that in advance of Wednesday's meeting, we read one of his papers from 1977, written with Adele Goldberg, called "Personal Dynamic Media". This paper presents their vision for personal computing and for portable computers called "Dynabooks".

I've found 2 versions of the article online: a version with an introduction that appeared in a 2003 collection called "The New Media Reader" and a scan of the original:

- http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf
- https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1977/03/01646405.pdf

(The whole New Media Reader book is really good and I'll bring it in on Wednesday, if anyone is interested in taking a look at it.)

At the meeting I will show a running Smalltalk system and I think it would also be awesome to discuss the Personal Dynamic Media paper together.

Looking forward to the conversations on Wednesday.

Simon
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