UK Smalltalk User Group meeting - Wednesday June 30th

[Giovanni Corriga]

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, June
30th.

Hernan Wilkinson ( https://twitter.com/HernanWilkinson ) will talk about
his LiveTyping project.

Currently, almost all mainstream dynamically typed languages support type
annotation a la Strongtalk. Python calls it "type hints", TypeScript is
JavaScript+type annotations, PHP calls it "type declarations" and Ruby does
it through a tool called Sorbet. All of them annotate the types in the
source code and it is the programmer who must write and maintain the
annotation. In all cases, it is not mandatory for the system to correctly
type check for it to run.
LiveTyping ( https://github.com/hernanwilkinson/LiveTyping ) is a type
system proposal for Smalltalk, that seeks similar objectives but
implemented in a different way. First, it is the environment itself that
collects and maintains the types based on the execution of the system, not
the programmer. Second, the types are not interleaved in the source code,
thus maintaining the syntax and simplicity of the language. And finally,
the main objective is not to carry out a static type checking (although it
supports it), but to augment the programmers experience increasing the
usability of current tools such as searching for senders and implementers,
and performing more accurate and safe refactorings.
In this talk Hernan will briefly show how LiveTyping is implemented to
later concentrate on the improvements made to the tools and the benefits it
brings when developing software with Smalltalk.
LiveTyping is currently implemented in Cuis Smalltalk (
https://cuis-smalltalk.org/ ) and has been successfully used for the last
two years in three different universities in Argentina when teaching Object
Oriented Programming and Design.

Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, this will be an online meeting
from home.

If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup
page ( https://www.meetup.com/UKSTUG/events/cbklbryccjbfc/ ) to receive the
meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!