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by David Naseby.
Original Post: Smalltalk and Ruby User Group Meeting
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Feed Description: Random wanderings through Ruby.
Back on the 20th of July, James Robertson of Cincom Smalltalk, and Michael Lucas-Smith and Rowan Bunning of WithStyle gave presentations to the combined forces of the Sydney Smalltalk and Ruby User groups. These two groups have never met en masse before; the common link (apart from the love of a dynamic language) is Bruce Badger, who presumably goes to Smalltalk User Group meetings for professional development, and Ruby group meetings for the alcohol.
Other differences between the groups were notable: the Smalltalkers typically wore suits, and worked professionally in Smalltalk, typically for banks. The Rubyists looked like refugees in comparison, and I don’t believe any of us use Ruby professionally for more than skunkworks projects. The Smalltalkers left at a reasonably sensible hour, leaving the Rubyists huddling over their pints. Smalltalk has 30 or so years of history, but clearly no staying power. (Or it could be that they were just smarter than us, as it was past last drinks at the time…)
The presentations themselves have been blogged by the 71232 presenters true&entry=3267810751. Jim’s presentation didn’t contain too much news for me, but he’s an entertaining and engaging speaker. WithStyle looks like a promising project – the speed of their tools is pretty amazing. WithStyle is playing against the big guys though – the client side stuff will have to compete with Avalon (when or if that comes out) and Flex, and of course, Mozilla/XUL. So they will just settle for aiming at intranets on that side anyway, I suspect. If the XML editor they demoed is released as standalone, they would have no competition – indeed people are bemoaning the lack of decent XML editors.
All in all, an excellent evening was had by many. Apart from a nasty hangover, I also picked up a copy of VisualWorks now, and I’m going to have to try it out. My only previous Smalltalk exposure has been Squeak (and a bit of Dolphin) – Squeak is a fairly intimidating beast to code in, compared to the taste of VisualWorks I’ve had. I don’t think I’ll be jumping ship to Smalltalk though. I just don’t look good in a suit.
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