I asked nicely, and Avi Bryant was kind enough to give me access to Dabble recently! It’s a really amazing application, and I’m really looking forward to giving it a run through. For those who don’t know, Dabble is a Web-based service that makes it easy to create database applications – without code. Here’s an example of a public Dabble application for Smalltalk jobs – it includes RSS feeds generated by Dabble, and HTML views.
My first application will probably be a version of the humble to do list. The to do list applications I use most often these days are the ones in my Treo/Palm Desktop and the ones in Basecamp. Both are relatively simple, and work fine as far as they go, but I find that I almost always revert to a text format for to do lists because to do list applications invariably are less flexible than I’d like.
This may all change, though. Dabble seems flexible enough that I can setup my to do lists to track any information I want, and even allows me to change my mind about what I want to track and takes care of backend changes magically.
As someone who makes her living partly as a programmer (I’m a Jill of all trades, really), I wish I could get my hands on the Dabble code – it would make things so much easier. And I mostly program in Ruby on Rails these days. That said, I really like Smallthought’s effort to keep Dabble code-free (from the users’ standpoint) – I can’t remember seeing anything as powerful as Dabble that didn’t involve coding before.
Of course, Dabble is written in Avi’s Seaside framework, so at least part of the power is available to programmers.
Unlike most Rails programmers, I chose to use Rails after already choosing to use Ruby, and I chose Ruby almost completely because it closely resembled Smalltalk. The main reasons that I’m not using Squeak and Seaside right now instead of Ruby and Rails are:
- The libaries I find myself needing a lot exist more often in the Ruby world than in Smalltalk (well, at least Open Source Smalltalk; I bet I could find most of what I need in VisualWorks). Things like regular expressions are not common in the world of Squeak (with Squeak, you can use a C plug-in, but it’d be nicer if it there were a native way to do regexes). Another library I’ve been using recently is Ferret, which is a Ruby port of the Lucene search engine.
- Smalltalk isn’t exactly the best when it comes to integrating with non-Smalltalk libaries (again, this might be different with the commercial Smalltalks).
- Squeak’s license. I’m not sure this is a big deal – there are some who think SqueakL is freer than many open source licenses – but it’s a recurring issue, if only because Debian won’t include it in their distribution.
- Believe it or not, but … Rails’ larger marketshare makes it easier to sell to customers.
Maybe when Dabble leaves beta and becomes a killer app. Seaside will get a lot more attention, and then the last of the issues above will go away. As for the others … at one point, the benefits of using Squeak an Seaside could outweigh the cons. There are plenty of times I’ve hunted down bugs in a Rails application where I wished I had something even remotely approximating Seaside’s debugging support. The breakpointer script is certainly better than nothing, and better than what some other frameworks offer, but it still has nothing on Seaside/Squeak. And, of course, there’s the fact that Seaside is a stateful framework. This means that you can set an instance variable in one method and expect that it’ll still be set when you call the next method, even if that’s in between a couple of page loads. And, of course, being a continuation-based framework (maybe the reference continuation based framework), there’s support for the back button.
If you haven’t seen Dabble in action, read through the Smallthought blog and check out the videos:
Also, if you’re curious about Seaside and when you might use it instead of Rails, check out the Ruby on Rails Podcast inteview with Avi Bryant. The sound quality starts off poorly, but it gets (somewhat) better later on.
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The Year of the Dog begins tomorrow … Hope everyone is having a Happy New Year’s eve!
I spent the day with other CJWP’s New Year’s Eve celebration. It was pretty small since New Year’s eve is traditionally a family day, and some people have family locally.
I made a vegan interpretation of a cucumber, agar agar, and chicken salad my Grand Aunt used to make.
Gung Hay Fat Choy! Sun Lin Fai Lok!
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I just got a save the dates e-mail for the 21st Bay Area Storytelling Festival: May 20 and 21, 2006. It’s an event I’ve always liked the idea of, but have never managed to go to. Although when I was in the Do-It-Herself Collective, we did do a Stories in Dolores event, where we met in Dolores Park and for a story circle. People could bring whatever they wanted, but we especially encouraged stories that were handed down. It turned out quite nicely. I talked to my parents about stories they had from their youth. One story they told was about Qu Yuan, whose death and life are celebrated by the Dragon Boat Festival. This is a story I had heard before, too. My Grand Aunt was probably the first to tell the story to my sister and I, and it was probably around the kitchen when she was making joong (aka zongzi). A lot of Chinese stories seem to have to do with food. ;-) My dad also told stories about his mom, who was a very strong woman, dealing with all kinds of troubles from snakes to violent neighbors.
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I like to think our neighbors up north are a lot more sensible than we are. So it’s sad to hear that a conservative government might take power in Canada after Monday’s election:
But polls showed he remains seven to 12 percentage points behind Harper despite charges that his party was full of social conservatives who would curb abortion and end gay marriage, and that foreign policy would be made in the Bush White House.
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January 20, 2006 · 1 comment
I read a lot of programming blogs regularly, and subscribe to several feeds on Smalltalk. I think that’s how I came across an article on Ted Leung’s blog about how he and his wife are teaching their daughters to program using Smalltalk (they started with Python). I thought Julie Leung’s article on their daughters learning programming was even more interesting. I thought these articles were great because I think the lack of women programmers is one of our culture’s great ills (not that we have any shortage of ills, mind you), and it’s great to read stories about parents encouraging their girls to learn programming at a young age. Secondarily, it was great to hear how well Squeak Smalltalk and Stéphane Ducasse’s “Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots” are working as teaching tools. I loved where Julie wrote:
Abigail’s stopped hugging the book, but I do hope she and her sisters continue to enjoy programming.
Hugging the book! That’s great!
Julie started her article with a link to an article on misbehaving.net that in turn lined to a writeup on Grand Text Auto on a talk by Hanna Wallach on women and computing (how’s that for indirection?). Some stuff that came out of that talk:
Women make up 28% of programmers in the proprietary software world, but only 1.5% in the FOSS world.
Men first get computers when they’re 15 on average; women don’t get their first computers until they’re 20.
Julie also writes about the passion that many programmers find for their art:
Most of all I want my daughters, like Elliot, to have a passion for discovery, creativity, logic and design, and to love learning, whether it is Squeak or Python or a language or book yet to be written.
I hope that there are more parents like the Leungs who are encouraging their daughters to learn programming at a young age! And that more parents follow Jill of misbehaving.net’s advice: “Buy your daughters computers!”.
If this happens, it’ll go a long ways to having more young women interested in programming and computer science as they enter college, or have that skill to apply to whatever they do. But what do we do about keeping women in computer programming positions? Back in the 1980s, we had a lot of women in CS programs in college. We’ve slid downhill a lot since those days, and not just in FOSS (I have doubts about that 28% figure in proprietary programming – it’s certainly far from true at most Bay Area companies I’ve seen). While encouraging intial interest in programming is a big problem, retaining women in the field of programming after they’ve started working professionally seems to be an even bigger problem.
I know some very successful women programmers. But I also know many who have dropped out of the field entirely. Not because of lack of interest, but because they felt there were so many barriers at work. In fact, of the female programmers I’ve worked with, I think fully half are now doing something other than programming.
The reasons aren’t mysterious, and there’s a long list that includes:
Child care is a problem in this country (and others). Both in that it’s not as valued as it should be, and also that it falls unevenly on women. As bad as it is at most companies, it’s even worse for FOSS projects – I don’t know of any FOSS projects that include child care collectives (although that would be really interesting to see!).
Discrimination and harrassment. Things have gotten better over the years, but this is still a big problem. In FOSS, it’s even worse, because there is no HR or other department to intervene when something happens. There’s always the community, but … well, not all communities are friendly to women programmers.
Unintentional discrimination and exclusion. It’s just weird being the only one (or few) of anything in a large group. And given the strict gender divisions in so many aspects of our society, being the only woman, or one of a few women, in a group of men can be troubling even if no one means you ill.
How do we address these and other issues? I’m not sure, but one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of women (myself included) have struck out on their own. Starting your own company is a great way to have control over your future (no more consternation about who gets the promotion, ‘cause you’re the boss!). And maybe it’s also a good way to start companies that will be women-friendly as they become bigger (of course, there’s no need to grow super big – it’d be great if there were tens of thousands of small women-owned, women-friendly companies flourishing).
So, parents, in addition to buying your daughters computers, maybe teach them something about starting their own businesses!
As for FOSS … it’s so great to hear that people like Hanna are making strides in the quest to make established FOSS projects like Debian more women-friendly, via efforts like Debian Women. Those efforts are important, and I look forward to seeing how they develop.
But I’d also really like to see more FOSS projects get started by women. I think it’s easier to start out with gender equity than to try to achieve it after a project has become established in a very uneven way. I don’t know of many FOSS projects that were founded by women – I’d love to hear of any, though, especially ones where groups of women are involved. And, if I ever find the time, maybe start one …
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Planned Parenthood Golden Gate is sponsoring an event tomorrow (Saturday, Jan. 21) to commemorate the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
In addition to acknowledge how far we’ve come since 1973, it also stands in contrast to another event the same day. From the PPGG Web site:
On the same day, the 2nd annual “Walk for Life” will be in town. As you may recall, last year PPGG took the lead in organizing a response. This year, we hope to counter their presence with a positive event that will help push our movement forward and allow us to reclaim the moral highground and not amplify the message of our anti-choice visitors. Allowing women to control their own bodies and futures is the only moral choice and we are proud that San Francisco and the Bay Area know this to be true. Please join us.
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