Welcome to Squeak

Welcome to Squeak

I've been looking at and installing Gnu Smalltalk at home over the weekend - Squeak seems to be going from strength to strength but it's a bit of a rich diet for someone used to Java, C, Perl and shell scripting. I need an intermediate stepping stone, and hopefully gst is it.

I learnt Smalltalk on an Open University course on OO design and programming several years ago, but found it very weird after C and mostly had as little to do with it as possible once the coursework had been done.

Then I adapted to Java and now I'm really interested in Smalltalk - all of the good ideas of Xerox Parc and Alan Kay/Dan Ingalls on language design were nicked by James Gosling for Java (along with much of Perl's), but Java is way overcomplicated - Smalltalk can still be explained in two pages. Dan Ingalls, who wrote the original Smalltalk for Parc, wrote a couple of good papers on his ideas which are here (if you ever feel the need to program in it). Dunno if you've come across it, but Squeak (www.squeak.org) is what Ingalls and Kay are working on now, and it is ... remarkable!

J. C. R. Licklider - The Man Behind Our Lifestyle

If you work with a computer, it seems to me you owe a tremendous debt to Lick, who did more than any other single person to shape people's perspectives on how computers could be used. He ultimately stimulated researchers into developing networking, graphical displays, and operating systems to support interactive computing, and he fostered their ideas in a unique way to turn his own vision into the reality that is personal computing today.

I thought I'd celebrate finishing "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell M. Waldrop- book of the year for me - by capturing this seminal pair of articles Licklider wrote in 1960 and 1968 ("Man-Computer Symbiosis" and "The Computer as a Communication Device"). Waldrop's book is intriguing and very well researched - Licklider's articles are just as prescient as when he wrote them 40 years ago. You should read them!

This illustration is from "The Computer as a Communications Device".

Music for Work

If like me you work in close proximity to colleagues who mutter to themselves, grunt over their (hourly) bag of crisps, or make inane telephone calls ... you probably already have invested in a pair of headphones and some CDs to play. But what constitutes good music for thinking to?

After weeding out most of the chill-out albums in my CD collection (too boring and repetitive), I have now ditched Cafe Del Mare for a more eclectic collection:

• Brian Eno - Ambient #4 - On Land
• Brian Eno - Ambient #1 - Music For Airports
• Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians
• Steve Reich - Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards
• Philip Glass - Jukebox
• Dave Brubeck - Gone with the Wind

I've been listening to Music for Airports and On Land since my teens in the mid-seventies: no matter how often I listen to them, they still stay fresh - you can ignore them 90% of the time, and then just catch the repeated phrase in a piece and go with the flow for a few minutes. Lovely if played reasonably softly (especially On Land, which really should be a film score for a wildlife film about quiet places).

Steve Reich is a different and more complex beast. The defining Steve Reich album is Music for 18 Musicians - one track long, 56 minutes of alternating mallet instruments, wind instruments, keyboards and voice. It's hypnotic. He's probably the best known minimalist composer. The sleeve notes for the Deutche Grammophon recording of Six Pianos and Variations suggest that his music is based on "slow transformations of miniscule motivic elements". He describes his style as resembling "pulling back a swing, releasing it slowly and observing it gradually come to rest ..." - when I listen to his music, I am reminded of the artist M.C. Escher.

Philip Glass - I find him good for short bursts (he always seems like a more up-front version of Reich to me) but I can't really focus on my work when I listen to him - too much insistence. If I'm coming out of my deep concentration period for a cup of coffee, Dave Brubeck's Georgia on Mind is perfect for contemplative study of the problem...