Your Smalltalk Industry Council in Action

Smalltalk in Seattle
05 November 2002

The Smalltalk Industry Council booth at OOPSLA 2002 in “sunny” Seattle was a rousing success.  Volunteers from Cincom, IBM, KSC, GemStone, SmallScript, Why Smalltalk and the NYC Smalltalk User Group had a blast as they discussed the latest and greatest with Smalltalk and planned for the future of this vibrant programming language.  Smalltalkers from all over the world descended on the booth to find out about the newly reformed STIC and were eager to join to help promote Smalltalk.  Pleasantly, quite a few Java and C++ folk stopped by to find what the buzz was about and were excited to find that Smalltalk already can do many of the things they wished their languages could.

A package of goodies went to new members including shirts, bags, lapel pins, CD’s with various non-commercial Smalltalk environments and presentations including videos from the successful Smalltalk Solutions 2002 conference.  STIC offers a special thanks to the European Smalltalk Users Group for supplying their Smalltalk compilation CD and their generous offer of discounts to ESUG events for STIC members.

Allen Davis, Executive Director of STIC, generated quite a bit of excitement as he shared his ideas about the future direction of STIC to booth attendees.  Allen wants to promote Smalltalk to the world through all mediums of communication.  “Smalltalk is the future of programming.  It has been seen as a secret weapon by many businesses and corporations because of Smalltalk’s high productivity, fast deployment and ease of maintenance.  We need to reach the executives and decision makers.  This is what I see as the role of STIC.”

Another highlight of the show was the announcement of the next Smalltalk Solutions conference.  Smalltalk Solutions 2003 will be held in Toronto, Canada July 13-16 2003 at the Crowne Plaza Toronto Centre.  All STIC members will receive a discount of $75.00 off their registration fee for the show.

The Smalltalk Industry Council wishes to thank all the volunteers of the STIC booth and OOPSLA conference attendees that stopped by.