As a precursor to the European Smalltalk User Group conference (http://tinyurl.com/42z7752) which is taking place in the Forum next week, Stephane Ducasse is going to give a one-day introduction to Smalltalk this coming Saturday. Knowing the lecturer I expect this to be a lot of fun; in particular, if you've always wanted to know about Smalltalk but been afraid to ask, come along. All welcome; no need to register, just turn up.
Date: Saturday 20th August Time: 10.30 - 17.00 (may finish earlier; there will be a break for lunch at some point; quiet coming and going is allowed) Place: Informatics Forum, G03
Discovering Smalltalk
Smalltalk is a pure and elegant object language. This lecture will cover the fundamental aspects of Smalltalk: syntax, semantics, and key aspects of the system. Doing so we will also revise the real semantics of self/super. We will show the power of polymorphism in action by simply learning from the system. Finally we will go into more design aspect again based on the systems. As a bonus we will start the lecture with a 15 min presentation of Seaside, a powerful web framework for dynamic web application.
This lecture may be followed by a lecture on more advanced object-oriented design: law of demeter, encapsulation, multiple interface of classes, composition vs. inheritance
Bio: He is expert in object-oriented language design, dynamic languages, reflective programming, language semantics as well as reengineering, program analysis, visualizations, software metrics. Recently he worked on traits, composable method groups, and this work got some impact. Traits have been introduced AmbiantTalk, Pharo, Perl-6, PHP 5.4 and Squeak. They influenced Scala and Fortress SUN Microsystems. Stephane is one of the developer of Pharo (http://www.pharo.project.org/) an open-source language inspired by Smalltalk. He is one of the core developer of Moose, an open-source reengineering environment (http://moose.unibe.ch/). He is the president of the European Smalltalk User Group and organize a yearly international conference on Smalltalk. He wrote a couple of fun books to teach programming and other serious topics such as dynamic web development (http://book.seaside.st).
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