The Loss of a Great Rubyist, A Dream, A Note

Yesterday I learned here that one of the great Rubyists I’ve never heard of, Guy Decoux, aka “ts,” had died.

Last night in my dreams that memory mutated, and I dreamed that _whytheluckystiff, creator of Shoes and many other whimsical Ruby projects, had died! I remember thinking sadly about Shoes left unfinished, never to fulfill _why’s dream of helping children learn to hack.

Today in my feed reader I came across _why’s note on the passing of ts, and was relieved to learn that a dream was only a dream.

Tangent: I’m finding myself very resistant to writing on this blog these days, as opposed to just writing to friends, or posting something to myface or spacebook or whatever, or bleating it to the handful of friends who follow my twitter feed, or just emailing it. I don’t know why. Just don’t feel the need to contribute to the Blog Oh Sphere, at all.

OK, NOW the iPhone is cool.

John M McIntosh announced on the squeak-dev mailing list that “I’m pleased to say that I’m one of the 1.5% of the iPhone developer population that has been accepted to officially build applications for distribution via Apple’s iPhone Application Store.”

He’s prepared a 93-day plan to build a new fully documented Objective C based source tree to host the Squeak VM on the iPhone and in addition as a 64bit VM on OS-X. He’s already collaborating with Impara who are looking at adapting the Squeak UI to the iPhone’s multi-touch paradigm and platform widgets, and is looking for further support (and funding) for this work.

John is also looking to offer support for Squeak developers hoping to make their applications available through the iPhone Store, although he notes that Apple has a number of restrictions limiting the types of applications that can be made available in this way.

[From Squeak on the iPhone! « The Weekly Squeak]

I love Smalltalk, specifically Squeak. I don’t actually use it for much, I have just enough experience playing around with it to see what is so sweet about it, but not enough to be really effective with it. Smalltalk on the iPhone? Now that’s cool.