I'm interested in Smalltalk as embodied in Dolphin Smalltalk and Squeak. My primary uses are Web applets, integration with relational databases, like Java's JDBC, primarily as support for Web publishing. My long term goal is to develop classes for building role-playing computer games, deployed by Web, but there are so many other worthwhile shorter projects on my short list that I won't get to that in quite a while. Among these are goodies and classes for pattern matching (in the LISP and AI sense, not in the regex sense), for parsing SQL and doing dataflow analysis of SQL sequences, for numerical computing, with combinatorial mathematics as a specialty (showing off Smalltalk's bignums), and teaching my younger son Squeak.
My efforts are part-time, since I'm pretty busy as a programmer-analyst for Cornell University. My experience with OOP ranges from Eiffel and the techniques taught in Meyer's Object-Oriented Software Construction, to Visual Basic (shudder!), and, much more recently, Actuate. Message-passing systems OTOH are nothing new to me, having been exposed to Carl Hewitt's Actors as a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Having been fortunate to obtain a solid understanding of LISP, especially Moon's Maclisp, a lot of these ideas and patterns of thinking are familiar.
I'm also working on techniques for literate programming with Smalltalk and Squeak ("Literate Squeaking"), and the series of projects I described are intended to serve as an experimental proving group. My thoughts toward technical support for literate programming tend toward using something like Toontalk as a means of explaining and illustrating the working of programs. I'm also interested in promoting Smalltalk and Squeak, and One of These Days will have a Web page devoted to that purpose.
Please contact me if you're interested in collaborating or if you have suggestions or references I should check out.
I can be reached using any of several e-mail addresses:
