Back to Programming - with Smalltalk

Since some years I've never written down one single line of code. Some reason was the change in my profession: starting as a software engineer, I currently work as Safety Engineer, a role which only writes many documents, but no code.

Starting this year, I'm also working on games for game based learning, or Enriched Games (better known by the not irritating term "Serious Games"). In this days of Web and Cloud, it is clear that my sample games have to run as web application. So the question arises, what platform or technology to use for this.

I've seen many programming languages. Haskell I like a lot, but needs sound knowledge of Category Theory to really unwrap its full power. Lua is interesting. Scala is interesting, but a little bit complex. Sometimes, I'm afraid that Scala is in danger to become the next C++. And then there is Smalltalk, my very old love.

It still holds that Smalltalk is a productive environment for me. Together with Aida/Web or Seaside, it is easy to build really fancy web applications. Well, Seaside can get very complex, I remember that I struggled many times about how to do this or that in Seaside. Today, the situation is far better, because there is a lot of documentation about it. And Smalltalk itself still has the very big advantage to be simple - in the environment as well as in the language. Anyway if you are a strong object monk or a functional evangelist, Smalltalk invites you to write down the solution in the way it is convenient for you.

In addition, the last ESUG has shown that there are interesting evolution efforts are ongoing with this old lady. Ok, I'm still missing comfortable remote programming (via web) and the capability of taking advantage of multicores. It seems that Smalltalk has still no strong answer to the coroutines, task pools, STM and whatever constructions introduced in other environments. I hoper there will be progress some day.

For me as one who want to concentrate to solutions, not studying libraries and complex design patterns which only hide the faults of the language design, Smalltalk a natural choice. Reflection and the Debugging on-the-fly make it easy to find out how given code (=libraries) work and to iterate toward the really useful and intended solution.

Smalltalk will not do all in my solutions. CouchDB and therefore Erlang will store data, communicating with XMPP to the Smalltalk application and maybe to other modules as well. But one thing is clear: Smalltalk is for me the best union of all concepts I like with the highest productivity I like. So I will use it - and Happy Smalltalking !

Started my work on Philosophers Erlang SVG Server

It is time now to start an project which is in my head a long time: the Philosophers Erlang SVG Server. A good friend helped be to get through the kick-off and to realy do it, so now I have set it up as an Google Code project. The beginning is always the hardest part, and it is done.

Details I am writing in the wiki of the Google Code. For now, there is not much to read there, but I hope it will grow steadily. Also, there is not much code yet, but Eclipse is set up with Erlang plug-in Erlide and direct contact to the SVN of Google Code, so, it can really really start.

Back to old hobbies

These days I have returned to work with Erlang. I can not really say what was the reason or impetus for doing so, but anyway, Erland is an interesting language, now and in the next time. In order to support my work a little bit better I have implemented a very simple syntax highlighting, compilation phase and file type for Erlang in Apples Xcode. Of course Xcode has its flaws, but the general approach it provides has some advantages.

What to do in Erlang ? Well, I had never lost my interest in SVG, and so I will try a little render engine for SVG, Not because I think that is what the world is waiting for, just to combine to interesting issues, and to provide a graphical interface for my Artificial Neuronal Network and Cellular Computing engine (dream, dream). Such kind of applications may be well suited for the distributed computing approach of Erlang.

The other thing I returned to is drawing. In fact I never drop this hobby, but in the last months and years it was put in deep background because of time. That should be corrected. Here, my main interest are characters or figures, in the style of Cartoons, Comics or Oil Pastells. The picture in this post is one example, a result from a so-called Manga drawing course. Ok, the word "course" is not appropriate, it was just a kind of gathering, but the people there were really interesting.
So let's go on !

Rendering documents

Since many years I am interested in Requirement Engineering and documentation for the development process (especially UML). This needs of course to create documents. Often, to create documents they must be written by hand using some office software (like OpenOffice). That seems normal, but documents in a company environment must have a defined format, must contain defined things. On the graphical side - the UML part for example - the writer have to bother with good visible layout and design.
So I dreaming of a system which could render documents like Requirments, Testplans or even diagrams. Well, some bigger software on the CASE market can this, so it is possible to form Microsoft Office documents from data base entries. As far as I know, they are mostly based on templates. But I want my own flexible render engine, which works more with design rules and a meta model of documents than with templates. Or in other words, I want to stress the point of *rendering*.
Because all moderen office software uses XML for storing their documents, document rendering can be done in any language, and I have of course some special of them in mind (Erlang, Smalltalk.
At my new job, I have to create a lot of documents, so I hope I can build a little bit during my work.