Author: smalltalkrenaissance
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Announcing the Winner of the 2022 JRMPC Competition
I am pleased to announce the winner of this year’s JRMPC competition. The judges reviewed all the submissions and came to the extraordinary decision that only Ana DuCristea of John G. Diefenbaker High School in Calgary, AB was worthy of an award. Her work was outstanding and constituted enormous dedication and enthusiasm for Smalltalk. Unfortunately, none of […]
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When Pigeons Talk: The Evolution of Programming Education
MIT’s Scratch and Google’s Blockly are two well-known programming platforms designed to teach programming to young novices. They use a visual style of programming whereby blocks are strung together to form software. While these systems are useful and pedagogically effective, they are not the ideal way to learn object-oriented programming, the most widely used paradigm […]
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Why I Love Rust and Smalltalk
Rust is a great language for its intended purposes and usage. Unfortunately, no language is good for everything and there are always major trade-offs. Personally, I think a great companion language for Rust is Smalltalk. Its strengths are Rust’s weaknesses, and its weaknesses are Rust’s strengths. Smalltalk is supremely simple and easy to learn and […]
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Smalltalk, big ideas and how to escape the island
Exciting Meetup coming next week: Don’t miss it!
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JRMPC 2022 Registration Is Now Open
This is the high school programming competition you’ve all been waiting for. Registration for it is now open. Registration is free! There are big prizes! For more details, visit https://jrmpc2022.wordpress.com/.
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The Reinvention of Instantiations
Instantiations is a major Smalltalk vendor with a long and illustrious history. This year, it reinvented itself with a huge rebranding exercise: I like it very much. I love the aesthetics. This will greatly enhance Instantiations’ image (pun intended) within the programming community. In addition to the rebranding, Instantiations has been very actively developing its […]
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Top Programming Languages for 2021
TIOBE Index for July 2021 C Java Python C++ C# Visual Basic JavaScript PHP Assembly language SQL Classical Visual Basic R Go Fortran Groovy Swift Ruby Perl MATLAB Delphi/Object Pascal PYPL for July 2021 Python Java JavaScript C# C/C++ PHP R TypeScript Objective-C Swift Kotlin Matlab VBA Go Rust Ruby Visual Basic Ada Scala Dart […]
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Brain Cancer?
Last night, I had a premonition in my sleep that I was going to get brain cancer. It literally scared me awake. And do you know what was the first thought on my mind? Not that I was going to leave my friends and family behind. Not that I wouldn’t survive to the average Canadian life expectancy […]
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50th Birthday Celebrations of Programming Languages
I did a quickie survey of 50th birthday celebrations for programming languages. I was disappointed to find very few legitimate events. Now, obviously, only programming languages created before 1972 could have had 50th birthday celebrations, languages like FORTRAN, LISP, COBOL, BASIC, and Pascal, to name the few living, prominent, surviving languages today. For these, I found […]
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Announcing Camp Smalltalk Supreme
I have the green light to proceed with Camp Smalltalk Supreme, the 2022 50th anniversary edition of Camp Smalltalk. It’s scheduled for June 10-12, 2022 at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. I’ve confirmed Adele Goldberg, Dan Ingalls, and Kent Beck as keynote speakers for this very special event! Adele and Dan were part of the original […]
Object-Oriented 