December, 2012: Squeak 4.4 released

Squeak 4.4 Ulam Spiral is finally ready to be born. I semi-volunteered to be its release manager, and I’d like to look back over the last six months and talk a bit about what’s happened.

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December, 2012: Compacting cyclic parsers

When I wrote my Smalltalk deriving-with-parsers library, I ran into an issue with compaction: cycles in the parser. Self-referencing parsers (corresponding to left- and right-recursive rules) occur naturally, so I couldn’t hide from the problem. I investigated two ways to introduce circularity as well as how to compact these graphs: delegates, and “sutures”.

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December, 2012: Not Just Text: Richer Stories on the Web

Seriously exciting stuff is happening to the way stories are being told on the web beyond a standard blog roll.

There are already some really good work on the web that showcase the ways a story can be brought alive through visual effects and interactive elements by combining bits HTML5, JS and CSS3 — you should just check out these web comics based on parallax: Never Mind the Bullets and Jess & Russ. I’d say both of these look like they are the fruits of many hours of hard work and are each rightfully a piece of art in themselves. There will only be more of these as time goes on.

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