Title: Selfish - a new message send for Smalltak
Speaker: John Aspinall
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/esug/selfish-a-new-method-send-for-smalltalk
Mon, August 18, 11:00am – 11:15am

Abstract: This presentation is a combination of experience report and a not-entirely-serious (but also not-entirely-silly) suggestion for a new type of method send for Smalltalk.

The presentation begins with a description of the implementation of a new form of Method Overrides for Cincom's VisualWorks Smalltalk. In this case "Overrides" refers to the replacement of one implementation of a method by another from an alternative package (Cincom's terminology for their own equivalent functionality). For reasons that will be explained, the standard Cincom implementation of overrides was not suitable for this particular project.

The presentation describes the advantages of this alternative implementation and a potential complication which was solved by the addition of a new type of method send - the "selfish" send. The purpose and implementation of the selfish send is the main focus of the presentation.

Bio: I have been working with Smalltalk since 1992, initially in academia and subsequently in a variety of employed and self-employed positions, covering all major commercial Smalltalk dialects. From 2000 to 2005 I ran my own company creating bespoke systems for SMEs using Dolphin Smalltalk; this led me to develop a number of tools and frameworks for Dolphin, most notably ReStore, an active record-style relational database interface. Since 2005 I have been employed at JPMorgan on their Kapital system, one of the largest and most long-lived commercial Smalltalk systems.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjw4D9RZ9I8