SIG Beer - Marcus Denker - Pharo: Past and Future
Location: Institut für Informatik und angewandte Mathematik (IAM), Universität Bern, Schützenmattstrasse 14, 3012 Bern, Room 107
About Marcus Denker
Marcus Denker is a member of the PLEIAD lab of the University of Chile. Before, he was a postdoc at the Software Compostion Group, University of Bern. His research focuses on reflection and meta-programming for dynamic languages. He is an active participant in the Squeak/Pharo open source community for many years. Marcus Denker received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bern/Switzerland in 2008 and a Dipl.-Inform. (MSc) from the University of Karlsruhe/Germany in 2004. He is a member of ACM, GI, and IEEE and a board-member of ESUG.
Talk abstract
Pharo is a new open source Smalltalk implementation based on Squeak (which in turn is based on the original Smalltalk). This talk will present the current state of development, highlighting both new features as well as the current development process and the challenges the community is facing.
In the second part of the talk, I will present possible ideas and directions for the future. An interesting question is how to enable change while at the same time preserving compatibility for existing users of the system. I describe the current situation and outline the solutions that have been put in place. I also identify some areas where problems continue to exist and propose these as potential problems to addressed by the research community.