The Pacific Northwest Smalltalk crew would like to invite you to Camp Smalltalk PDX this October. Join us in beautiful Portland, Oregon for a memorable weekend.

There is no set schedule as of now. Likely topics include:

• Smalltalk on iOS and Android
• Web Frameworks
• GemStone OODB
• Virtual machine implementations
• Data processing applications
• Language design

If you are curious about Smalltalk, learn from the experts. If you are an expert, influence the future generation of Smalltalkers!

Camp Smalltalk is a gathering of Smalltalk enthusiasts.

There is no set schedule, but of course we all have strong interests. Some of the areas that will surely be covered include:

• Smalltalk on small devices, such as Scratch on Raspberry PI
• Web frameworks such as Seaside
• Virtual machine implementations
• Data processing applications
• Language design, Smalltalk and beyond

If you are curious about Smalltalk, feel free to drop by and give Smalltalk a try.

Registration

https://www.picatic.com/event14352674835773927

Discussion of all things related to the Smalltalk programming language and environment. Open to all interested.

Expected to include several short presentations

Discussion of all things related to the Smalltalk programming language and environment. Open to all interested.

Expected to include several short presentations

Discussion of all things related to the Smalltalk programming language and environment. Open to all interested.

Expected to include several short presentations, and a discussion of trait composition as applied to classes.

Discussion of all things related to the Smalltalk programming language and environment. Open to all interested.

Expected to include several short presentations.

Dale Henrichs will talk about using Git to store Monticello packages and Metacello configurations. There may also be presentations about using combinator parsers in Pharo and using Smalltalk in VMWare's Cloud Foundry.

A group of us will probably go for a beer or two afterwards

In the 1970’s, researchers at Xerox PARC gave themselves a glimpse of the future by building computers that, although wildly impractical at the time, let them experience plentiful fast cycles and big memories. PARC researchers invented Smalltalk, and the freedom afforded by such a dynamic, yet safe, language, led them to create a new experience of computing, which has become quite mainstream today.

In the end of the first decade of the new century, chips such as Tilera’s can give us a glimpse of a future in which manycore microprocessors will become commonplace: every (non-hand-held) computer’s CPU chip will contain 1,000 fairly homogeneous cores. Such a system will not be programmed like the cloud, or even a cluster because communication will be much faster relative to computation. Nor will it be programmed like today’s multicore processors because the illusion of instant memory coherency will have been dispelled by both the physical limitations imposed by the 1,000-way fan-in to the memory system, and the comparatively long physical lengths of the inter- vs. intra-core connections. In the 1980’s we changed our model of computation from static to dynamic, and when this future arrives we will have to change our model of computation yet again.

If we cannot skirt Amdahl’s Law, the last 900 cores will do us no good whatsoever. What does this mean? We cannot afford even tiny amounts of serialization. Locks?! Even lock-free algorithms will not be parallel enough. They rely on instructions that require communication and synchronization between cores’ caches. Just as we learned to embrace languages without static type checking, and with the ability to shoot ourselves in the foot, we will need to embrace a style of programming without any synchronization whatsoever.

In our Renaissance project at IBM, Vrije, and Portland State (http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr/renaissance/), we are investigating what we call “anti-lock,” “race-and-repair,” or “end-to-end nondeterministic” computing. As part of this effort, we have build a Smalltalk system that runs on the 64-core Tilera chip, and have experimented with dynamic languages atop this system. When we give up synchronization, we of necessity give up determinism. There seems to be a fundamental tradeoff between determinism and performance, just as there once seemed to be a tradeoff between static checking and performance.

The obstacle we shall have to overcome, if we are to successfully program manycore systems, is our cherished assumption that we write programs that always get the exactly right answers. This assumption is deeply embedded in how we think about programming. The folks who build web search engines already understand, but for the rest of us, to quote Firesign Theatre: Everything You Know Is Wrong!

ABOUT THE GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby, libraries, tools and techniques. The group usually meets on the first Tuesday of the month, "Ruby Tuesday".

• Markus Roberts will amaze and horrify the masses again with his latest Ruby hangman puzzle.
• Jesse Cooke will present Lorentz, a Redis data store clone he's written for the MagLev Ruby interpreter.
• Tim Felgentreff will share his further adventures in writing a Smalltalk-style Ruby debugger for MagLev.
• Igal Koshevoy will give an overview of using Vagrant to quickly and easily provide consistent development environments for your apps.
• Igal Koshevoy will talk about pragmatic metaprogramming and demonstrate code from Citizenry (http://epdx.org) that demonstrates how to create reusable functionality and eliminate duplicate code.
• We'll also discuss interesting stuff brought up at the recent RubyConf.
• ...and other awesome Ruby-related discussion!

Interested in building apps using core web technology—HTML5, Javascript and CSS?

Then you don’t want to miss Mobile Portland this month as we take a look at three awesome tools and frameworks for mobile web development.

We’re pleased to welcome James Pearce, Brian LeRoux and Patrick Mueller to Portland. They’ve graciously agreed to take time out from their busy OSCON schedules to talk to us about:

• World Premiere! Client-side data-bound mobile charting with Sencha Touch
• Cloud-based app binaries using PhoneGap Build.
• Weinre: a remote debugger for web pages on mobile device.

If you’re doing any mobile web development work, these are tools you need to know about. And given the number of apps that include embedded web views, it means nearly everyone is doing some sort of mobile web development.

Special OSCON Note

Mobile Portland is a free monthly meeting open to anyone. If you are in town for OSCON, please feel free to join us. All that we ask is that you RSVP so we know how many chairs we need.

You can take the MAX train for free from the convention center and then take a short walk (.4 mi) to the meeting location.

If you’re a Portlander who isn’t attending OSCON, you should! Not only is the largest open source conference, but there are mobile tracks with detailed presentations from Patrick Mueller and two of Brian LeRoux’s Nitobi colleagues.

About the Speakers

Brian LeRoux, Nitobi SPACELORD!1!!, PhoneGap Contributor, Mobile Web Enthusiast, Tolerant of JavaScript, Trucker Mouth

Brian LeRoux is the lead at Nitobi Software with the prestigious title SPACELORD!1!! He also has the dubious distinction of being the creator of wtfjs.com despite a twisted love for the language of the web. To make matters worse he actually has a non-breaking space tattoo.

Aside all these ridiculous distractions he is also responsible for leading the direction on the wildly popular PhoneGap software project that has the audacious goal to provide a web platform complete with device APIs for all smartphone operating systems.

James Pearce, Senior Director of Developer Relations, Sencha

James is a technologist, writer, developer & entrepreneur who has been working with the mobile web for over a decade. He is Senior Director of Developer Relations at Sencha. Previously he was the CTO at dotMobi and has a background in mobile startups, telecoms infrastructure and management consultancy.

He speaks extensively on the topic of mobile web development, and has written books for both Wiley and Wrox.James led the development of mobiForge, DeviceAtlas and ready.mobi, and is the creator of tinySrc, the WordPress Mobile Pack, and WhitherApps. He has declared every year since 1997 to be "The Year of the Mobile Web" - and feels like he might finally be right.

Patrick Mueller, WebKit contributor, IBM

Patrick Mueller is a software developer at IBM in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina. He’s been working on web software and mobile software for a long time. Don’t ask how long, unless you want to hear about how great it was to use Smalltalk for web and mobile software development.

Thanks to our Sponsors

Thanks to azad and Urban Airship for helping sponsor Mobile Portland this month.

Presented by Brian Ford

Ruby is a highly dynamic, strongly-typed programming language created by Yukihiro Matsumoto in 1993 and first released in 1995. It borrows from Smalltalk, Lisp, and Perl. Ruby has single inheritance, mixins, and syntax features like omission of parentheses that make it well-suited for embedded domain-specific languages. Ruby was popularized by the Ruby on Rails web development framework.

The Rubinius project began as an implementation of the Ruby programming language roughly following the design of the Smalltalk-80 virtual machine described in the Blue book (“Smalltalk-80: the language and its implementation” by Adele Goldberg and David Robson). We have extended the initial implementation based on modern research in virtual machines, garbage collectors, and just-in-time (JIT) compilers. Rubinius currently features a stack-oriented opcode virtual machine, generational garbage collector, and LLVM-based JIT compiler. Most of the Ruby core library and the bytecode compiler are written in Ruby.

We will examine the main features of Rubinius and take a deeper dive into some aspects of the virtual machine and JIT compiler. We will also look at possible future work to address memory load, startup, and suitability for using Rubinius in Android phones. If there is time and interest, we will discuss implementing programming languages besides Ruby on Rubinius.

Small talk about all things Smalltalk, the object-oriented programming language and environment.

This month's program includes a presentation by Brian Rice about Slate's Haskell-based descendent Atomo, and what features he'll be drawing back into Slate, including Smalltalk-oriented pattern-matching. Also, Slate is gaining general assignment syntax in a non-abstraction-breaking way using Slate's macro facility.

Finally, and intriguingly, a student, Max OrHai, who has been working on Dave Ungar's parallel Squeak VM, has a nice demo.

The meeting is in room 086-01 of FAB, known to some directional signs as room 86-01. This room is under the plaza between the Engineering Building and the Fourth Avenue Building, you may enter through either lobby and go down the stairs.

The room will open slightly before 7:00. Building front doors are open, but in previous meetings at this location have been locked at 8:00PM.

pdx.st is the Portland Smalltalk Users Group. The group welcomes programmers interested in the Smalltalk language. Members interact through a mailing list and meet regularly for presentations, demos and discussions.

PRESENTATION

                           An Overview of
                              Berkley DB

                                  by

                            David Segleau

Director Product Management - Berkeley DB

 Berkeley DB originated at the University of California, 
 Berkeley as part of the transition (1986 to 1994) from 4.3BSD 
 to 4.4BSD and of the effort to remove AT&T-encumbered code.
 It has evolved a great deal since then and is now part
 of Oracle where it is distributed with source code under 
 a dual use license.

 Berkeley DB (BDB) is a computer software library that provides 
 a high-performance embedded database, with bindings in C, C++, 
 PHP, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Smalltalk, and other languages. 
 BDB stores arbitrary key/data pairs as byte arrays, and supports 
 multiple data items for a single key. BDB can support thousands 
 of simultaneous threads of control or concurrent processes 
 manipulating databases as large as 256 terabytes, on a wide 
 variety of operating systems including most Unix-like and 
 Windows systems, and real-time operating systems.

Small talk about all things Smalltalk, the object-oriented programming language and environment.

This month's program includes a presentation by Andres Valloud on new work on VisualWorks garbage collection and memory policies.

The meeting is in room 086-01 of FAB, known to some directional signs as room 86-01. This room is under the plaza between the Engineering Building and the Fourth Avenue Building, you may enter through either lobby and go down the stairs.

The room will open slightly before 7:00. Building front doors are open, but in previous meetings at this location have been locked at 8:00PM.

Small talk about all things Smalltalk, the language that started it all and is still incredibly fun to work with.

This month's topics:

• Martin McClure (with help from Andres Valloud) will talk about hashed collection performance in Pharo. This has been found to be rather bad for many collections, and Martin and Andres have written simple changes that deliver 2-3 orders of magnitude improvement.

• Brian T. Rice will give an update on Slate.

The building doors are locked; a number to call to be let in will be posted on the front door.

pdx.st meets on the fourth Tuesday of each month. If you have a presentation you'd like to give, or one you'd like to see, post to the list (see website URL).

Small talk about all things Smalltalk, the language that started it all and is still incredibly fun to work with.

This month's presentation is by Brian T Rice, on his Slate language, a “clean slate” object-oriented Smalltalk-style environment.

The building doors are locked; a number to call to be let in will be posted on the front door.

pdx.st meets on the fourth Tuesday of each month. If you have a presentation you'd like to give, or one you'd like to see, post to the list (see website URL).

Small talk about all things Smalltalk. This month's presentations will include a short presentation by Martin McClure on the design of a special-purpose hashed dictionary.

If you have a presentation you'd like to give, or one you'd like to see, post to the list (see website URL).

The building doors are locked; a number to call to be let in will be posted on the front door.

Small talk about all things Smalltalk. This month's program includes the presentation

The Laws of Form and Computer Programming

by Andres Valloud. The meeting is in room 86-01 of FAB. Pizza at 6:30, presentations start at 7:00. Building front doors are locked at 8:00PM.

This month, it's small talk about Smalltalk! That is, we have no scheduled main presentation, so bring your short (or longer) presentations, ideas, whatever you've been working on or wondering about.

A study/user group exploring the world of functional programming based in Portland, Oregon. The group welcomes programmers interested in all functional languages, including Haskell, Erlang, OCaml, Scala, and others. The group meets regularly and provides presentations, demos and discussions applicable to all skill levels, from newbies and experts. The meetings are usually on the second Monday of the month.

This month, Wm Leler will talk about Constraint Satisfaction Systems and the Bertrand Programming Language. Wm is the creator of Bertrand and the author of the book "Constraint Programming Languages: Their Specification and Generation".

Constraint Satisfaction Systems were a hot topic of research in the 80's -- famous constraint systems include Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, Alan Borning's ThingLab (built on top of Smalltalk), Guy Steele's constraint language, and James Gosling's Magritte. These systems were used for computer graphics, design, and general numeric problem solving, but most of these solvers were domain specific and thus of limited usefulness.

Bertrand is an equational programming system whose purpose is to build constraint satisfaction systems using simple equational rules. Bertrand has an purely declarative semantics and an absurdly simple syntax, yet it is a powerful and expressive language, capable of solving problems in a large number of domains including graphics, word problems, electrical circuits, or -- with the right rules -- virtually any mostly-linear domain.

Since this is the Functional Programming Study Group, this talk will cover the underlying equational programming language of Bertrand and ways in which it could be extended to make it more powerful.

While many people may know Randal Schwartz of Stonehenge Consulting (http://www.stonehenge.com/) from his talks and papers on Perl, he is also quite knowledgeable about Smalltalk and will be giving a talk on Smalltalk and Postgres integration.

We will be meeting Thursday, November 20th, at FreeGeek at 7:00pm - 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there....and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab (http://www.luckylab.com/ ) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterwards.

Factor is a programming language which has been in development for a little over 5 years. Factor is influenced by Forth, Lisp, Smalltalk. Factor takes the best ideas from Forth — simplicity, short, succint, code, emphasis on interactive testing, and meta-programming. Factor also brings modern high-level language features such as garbage collection, object orientation and functional programming familiar to users of languages such as Lisp, Smalltalk and Python. Finally, recognizing that no programming language is an island, Factor is portable, ships with a full-featured standard library, deploys stand-alone binaries, and interoperates with C and Objective-C.

In this talk, I will give the rationale for Factor’s creation, present an overview of the language, and show how Factor can be used to solve real-world problems with a minimum of fuss. At the same time, I will emphasize Factor’s extensible syntax, meta-programming and reflection capabilities, and show that these features, which are unheard of in the world of mainstream programming languages, make programs easier to write, more robust, and fun.

Biography:

Slava was born in the former USSR and emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 7. He moved to Ottawa, Canada when he was 18 to study for a Bachelors and Masters degree in Mathematics.  He now resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. An early adopter of Java, Slava wrote the popular jEdit text editor, then went on to design and implement the Factor programming language. At his day job he hacks on web apps, optimizing compilers, garbage collectors, and everything in between

. Galois has been holding weekly technical seminars for several years on topics from functional programming, formal methods, compiler and language design, to cryptography, and operating system construction, with talks by many figures from the programming language and formal methods communities.

The talks are open and free. If you're planning to attend, dropping a note to is appreciated, but not required. If you're interested in giving a talk, we're always looking for new speakers.

pdx.st is the Portland Smalltalk Users Group. The group welcomes programmers interested in the Smalltalk language. Members interact through a mailing list and meet regularly for presentations, demos and discussions.

Even though PG Con West will be going on October 10-12 in sunny (hopefully) Portland, we will still have our monthly meeting on October 16, 2008. This month, Selena Deckelmann will provide a tutorial on setting up Point-in-time recovery for your PostgreSQL installation. This will be hands on, with the ever-dangerous LIVE DEMO.

We will be meeting at FreeGeek - 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR.

In November, our own Randal Schwartz of Stonehenge Consulting (http://www.stonehenge.com/) will be giving a talk on Smalltalk and Postgres integration.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there....and of course, drinks at the Lucky Lab (http://www.luckylab.com/ ) at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. afterwards.

Join fellow programmers interested in Smalltalk for discussions and demos. This is our first meeting of the fall season. Michael Lucas-Smith, Cincom engineer and new Portland resident, will be demonstrating WebVelocity. Other topics may include CouchDB, OpenGL, and building a new website for the group.

The building is in an "L" shape. The main entrance is at the inside corner. The door will be locked, but a phone number to call to be let in will be posted there. If you don't have a cell phone, get there more or less on time and we'll check the door to see if you're waiting.

We often go to a pub after the meeting for food, a beer, and more discussion.

FOSCON 2008: Cooking with Ruby

What: FOSCON is a free, fun gathering of Ruby fans held during an evening of O'Reilly's OSCON conference with cool presentations, food, discussions, and a live coding competition. Who: Anyone interested in Ruby, whether you're just curious or a seasoned pro. Where: CubeSpace, Portland, Oregon near the Oregon Convention Center (directions). When: Wednesday, July 23, 2008 from 6pm-9pm. Why: The Portland Ruby Brigade user group wants to share the joy of Ruby with you.

Presentations * IronRuby: John Lam * Selectricity and RubyVote: Benjamin Mako Hill * Ruby performance: Brian Ford * Musical glasses: Gregory Borenstein * Five minutes with Selenium: Ian Dees, author of "Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby" * Ruby culture: Audrey Eschright, Reid Beels and Igal Koshevoy of Calagator * Ruby server automation: Igal Koshevoy on AutomateIt * Ruby on Rails profiling: M. Edward Borasky on applying Linux OProfile * Ruby web development: John Labovitz on Gossamer, a microframework to spin websites out of distributed, lightweight, ephemeral resources * Live coding competition: Ruby on Rails, and hopefully Python Django, PHP Symfony, Drupal, and/or GemStone/S Smalltalk Seaside (details)

Likely topics of discussion: * CloudRCS: Ruby revision control * MagLev: update on Smalltalk-based Ruby * New Relic RPM: performance monitoring plugin for Rails * Phusion Passenger: simple and efficient web application server * Ruby Enterprise Edition: a fast, secure and efficient Ruby fork * Rack: Ruby web application interface * Sinatra: a classy microframework for the web

Sure, Smalltalk is where we got our modern view of windows and mice and "the desktop" and object-oriented programming and extreme programming two decades ago, but what has Smalltalk done for us lately?

I'll answer this by showing off the Seaside web application framework: an open-source (but vendor supported) challenge to the classic web design strategies. Imagine being able to debug a broken web-hit in the middle of the hit, fixing the code, and continuing before the browser knows that something went wrong. Imagine being able to re-use control flows and web components with the ease of OO programming. Imagine being able to do test-driven development, even for HTML delivery. Imagine taking an application from "three guys in Starbucks on a laptop" to "3000 hits per second on your Amazon EC2 cloud" with no major changes in design. No need to imagine... I'll demonstrate all this and more.

Smalltalk knowledge is not required: I'll start with a brief overview of Smalltalk using Squeak, the free implementation that's even included in the OLPC XO. General knowledge of Object-Oriented Programming basics would be helpful, though.

Please note that this talk is a work in progress... this presentation is a rehearsal for the actual delivery in mid-April in Brazil at FISL 2008. Some parts are still a bit rough.