Briefly about me
I'm a 21 years old (male) student living in Brussels. My native language is Dutch, but I am also fluent in English and quite good in French.
About my study
I am in my first master computer sciences minor software engineering at the university of Brussels. I am in the board of the studentsgroup of computer scientists.
My interests
My hobbies are computer/board games and playing electric/classical guitar. In the domain of computers I am interested in language engineering/design, game AI and metaprogramming.
My non-Smalltalk experiences so far
I've started programming in Scheme in my first bachelor. In the 2nd bachelor we learned C++ and I learned Ruby by myself. For my 3rd bachelor thesis I've programmed in Common Lisp and did some projects in Java. Last summer I did a small project in Java.
Here is a more detailed list of the projects I did
- Metro simulation in Scheme (1st bachelor)
- Multithreaded server processing articles using HTTP as protocol in C++ (2nd bachelor)
- Pacman in Scheme (2nd bachelor)
- Online calendar in a group of 7 people in Java/Tomcat/MySQL (3rd bachelor)
- DSL for FSM based Game AI in Common Lisp (with macros) (3rd bachelor)
- Extending an interpretor for a small artificial language in C (3rd bachelor)
- Flight scheduler in Prolog (1st master)
- Compiler from TinyC to x86 in Common Lisp (1st master, still working on it)
I also did some projects on my own
- Several websites in Ruby on Rails
- Bindings to libproc in Common Lisp using a FFI, released under BSD licence ( http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-proc/ )
My Smalltalk experiences so far
Last semester we had a course ( principles of object-oriented languages) in which we used Pharo. We also had to make a small project in Pharo. There are several people working on Pharo at the university, encouraging us to use Smalltalk.
Why am I interested in Smalltalk?
I like the clean code the language encourages. From the perspective of language engineering I think it has a great design, where you can easily trace bugs. In Pharo I've found several bugs in the editor myself (we used it during the beta-stages) just by inspecting the stack. When looking at other languages you can find ideas that inhabited from Smalltalk.
Will I stay with Smalltalk after the finished project?
I am already contributing (whenever possible) to some opensource projects. If I have an enjoyable experience with this project I will continue to use Smalltalk for my own projects and contribute back to the Smalltalk community, just as I do now for other languages I use.
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