Add post on smalltalk pairing

_posts/2012-02-09-fosdem-smalltalk-pairing.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "FOSDEM: Smalltalk Pairing"
+tags:
+- smalltalk
+- fosdem
+- fosdem2012
+- tripdiary
+---
+
+As I [previously mentioned](/2012/01/14/realtalk.html), I've been learning
+Smalltalk lately, in an attempt the understand the language that inspired two
+of my other favorite languages: Objective-C and Ruby.
+
+This past weekend at FOSDEM, I was fortunate enough to attend a few sessions in
+the "Smalltalk devroom", which from my understanding made its debut appearance
+at this year's conference. I'll save my thoughts on
+[Amber.js](http://www.amber-lang.net) for another time, but in this post I
+wanted to talk about the Smalltalk Workshop which was held at the end of the
+day.
+
+
+One of my major stumbling blocks with Smalltalk has been general unfamiliarity
+with the development environment, the workshop was the *perfect* opportunity to
+resolve some of this. The structure was to pair one experienced Smalltalker
+with one noob, and for both to work through a pre-planned exercise with an
+existing image and application set up.
+
+<center><a
+href="http://www.a3aan.st/fosdem2012/index.php/view/23/01+DevRoom/IMG_6452.JPG" target="_blank"><img
+src="http://agentdero.cachefly.net/unethicalblogger.com/images/pairing-on-smalltalk-at-fosdem.JPG" alt="Pairing on Smalltalk" width="500"/></a><br/><em>Haxx haxx haxx</em> (Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Os)</center>
+
+While my partner (Norbert) and I did not complete all the exercises, we did
+spend a good amount of time discussing and working through the "Smalltalk way",
+or at least Norbert's Smalltalk way, of solving particular problems,
+refactoring and method structure.
+
+One of the things that struck me as we worked through the exercises was how
+small the ideal method body is for most things in Smalltalk. I don't think
+there was a single method that was longer than 10 lines, except for some test
+methods which certainly had a bad code smell.
+
+Below is a sample of one of the longest methods I wrote in the entire workshop:
+
+    vote: aVote for: aUser
+      author ~= aUser ifTrue: [
+        self votes
+          detect: [ :vote | vote author = aUser and: [ vote direction = aVote direction]]
+          ifNone: [ self votes add: aVote ]]
+
+I'm quite happy with the way things turned out, while I didn't anything I
+didn't know already about [Seaside](http://www.seaside.st), I did learn a *lot*
+about using the development environment effectively and test-driven development
+"the Smalltalk way" which as it turns out is quite impressive.
+
+
+I'm looking forward to learning more about the ways of the
+[Pharo](http://www.pharo-project.org), maybe next year I'll count as one of the
+experienced Smalltalkers.