Rather than just cross post the announcement I made on squeak-dev, I figured I'd write a separate note for this list. I've been thinking about trying to identify like-minded programmers in my area. I go to the local Ruby and Perl groups from time to time, and I often feel like I'm hijacking the conversation there, so I decided to start a meet up group where I don't have to justify talking about the tech I'm most interested in.
Industry people often tend not to want to hear about current research, if just because there's that learned helplessness around "I won't be able to use this at work until I'm retired." I reckon I can put a ding in that culture. It may have taken 29 years of searching for a Squeak image to land in my lap, but this isn't 1970, my grandfather just hit me up on Facebook to point out that Facebook has totally jumped the shark. I don't think we really need to wait thirty years to make our "industrial" software suck less, because the puzzle pieces are displayed in three dimensions beneath the glass of the tabletop in front of us now, and there's nothing left in the way of a dialogue about them except the preconceptions in our minds. I chose the name because I thought "smalltalk programming" as a topic would be the most searchable and searched upon phrase that people interested in coming to something like this might type. Total stupid Google trick. In fact, I really just want a friendly venue where folks can talk about whatever technology interests them, and I wanted to point out that absolutely everything that I've seen discussed on this list is 100% on-topic as far as I'm concerned, so if you're in the area: please, sign up! And if not, think about dropping in sometime if you're ever in the neighborhood. If there's a real theme, it's late bound systems, but if you wanted to talk about the JVM? Okay. Used to be called Strongtalk right? That's good enough for me. Want to talk about an idea you had to simplify CLOS? Or about how you're halfway finished making your Sketchpad clone work on the iPad? Have a language you've invented? Feel like you're so close to identifying the Bose-Einstein condensate of computer programming that you can almost taste it in macroscopic space? This is what I want to hear about over chai or beer when my workaday is done, so come on out and shout. The site is here: http://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Smalltalk-Users-Group/ -- Casey Ransberger
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