I went to Biloxi and all I got was a Tshirt, part 2

> http://www.zeromq.org/
> http://www.zeromq.org/bindings:smalltalk
> http://www.squeaksource.com/ZeroMQ
>
> Here's a Ralph Johnson-ism for you: "Floating point is broken
> arithmetic". Seems his bete noire as an undergraduate and grad student
> was floating point. He'd get As in all his courses, but stumble on
> anything related to floating point. Then one day he figured it was just
> broken and never had a problem again.
>
> Ralph Johnson and Sam Adams from IBM, who is doing the parallel OOP talk
> today, sat at the back of the Dart presentation, laughed at things Eric
> Clayberg was saying, and generally were like the bad kids in the class.
> Clayberg would ask what was going on at the back row and just what was
> so funny. Ralph would say enigmatic things like "I'm really glad Dart
> has floating point!" I do get the impression they all know each other.
>
> Dart has a type system, but you don't need to use it. And you can use it
> wrong.
>
> int notReallyAnInt = 'Aaron'
>
> This works just fine. Apparently the type system "is designed not to be
> sound".
> Dart takes the idea of 'isolates' from Erlang. They are processes that
> don't share state, so I guess they are the opposite of threads. There is
> an override for definitions, so it's possible to have two isolates, two
> threads with separate definitions of something as fundamental as Symbol.
> Dart has no reflection, though they are planning to add 'mirrors' to
> provide it. This seems to be where you copy an object and make
> reflective requests of it without touching the original.
> Clayberg said over and over that they want to make Dart familiar, so
> arrays start at zero. This kind of thing.
> There is no eval() as in JavaScript. I'd imagine that cuts down on the
> metaprogramming capability. eval() allows for the program to generate
> code that it can execute within itself. It's slow and Dart wants to be
> speedy.
> You can snapshot with Dart and it can compile to JavaScript.
>
> It's hard to know who Dart is for, what its target market is, if there
> was an origin story, etc. One person asked whether Dart would replace
> Java on Android. Or is Dart to replace JavaScript for JavaScript
> programmers? It does seem plausible that Dart is for Java programmers
> extending their reach into the browser. The presentation was about
> features and not strategy, so it wasn't clear to me.
>
> Earlier in the day I met Sebastian Heidbrink of Heidbrink Consulting. He
> lives on Vancouver island and tends a banking client in Germany. Half of
> his coworkers never realized he moved. When he goes from Vancouver
> island to Vancouver the city he finds people so frenetic as to be
> distressing. I find that hilarious. When I go to Vancouver I feel as
> though I've been forcibly sedated.
>
> Sebastian said "I've got Seaside running on ZeroMQ". I had no idea what
> that meant. He's a big believer of the cloud as an application. If
> something needs doing, don't add it to your code, fire a socket at
> something that already does the job. ZeroMQ allows to ... I'm not sure
> what it does other than it's a networking layer and allows many things
> to run at once. It's interesting and there are links above with a
> binding on SqueakSource.
>
> Johnny T also know as John Thornton made a presentation on Amber, which
> looks very polished. He had a slide describing how primitive it is to
> switch from a text editor to a browser when writing HTML, JS, or CSS,
> and isn't it wonderful that you can use this great in-browser browser to
> do it all in the same place the way Amber does. I think this is silly. I
> have to add precisely two keyboard shortcuts to go back and forth
> between TextMate and Chrome. I like it. I think Johnny T is prone to be
> a little susceptible to the 'goly! gee!' nature of things, so that he
> confuses what is cool for what is practical.
>
> His presentation on Amber was good. He likes to do things like code
> node.js applications using Amber. After his talk he talked with
> Heidbrink who told him about ZeroMQ. His conversion was instantaneous.
> The two are going to do a lightning talk on Wednesday about using ZeroMQ
> for Amber.
>
> Today Sam Adams gives a talk on parallel OOP, which I think is going to
> be about the Roar VM. Chris Muller is going to give a talk on
> Location-Aware Networks, Context and Business-Intelligence. The
> Smalltalk Directions panel with Ralph Johnson is today. Again, I have no
> idea what that'll be about. I figure I'll make it to those three. The
> others that catch my eye are Using Glorp with New Projects That Need to
> Access Legacy Data by Mark Grinnell and Object-Centric Profiling:
> Advanced Visualizations to Tame Wild Execution with Alexander Bergel.
>
> There was a boat ride at the end of yesterday on the Gulf. That was fun.
> There are pelicans here with eighteen inch beaks. The sand beaches are
> like white sugar. The boat trip out into the bay was an hour and a great
> way to drink and chat.
>
> Chris
>
>