Read last year's new year speech.

New Year Speech by the Chairman of the BSUG vzw, David Grietens

At the end of this second year of the BSUG vzw, I must admit that it hasn't been an easy year for the BSUG board. We have had our ups and downs into believing in the future of our organization. That didn't have so much to do with our personal feelings about our organization or the Smalltalk language, but it was rather the result of the low amount of feedback we get from our members in the activities that we organize with all our best intentions. But the fact that we are standing here again, for our second annual meeting with new plans for the coming year proves that we have survived these difficult times, and have decided to try even harder to get your attention, encourage your active involvement and most importantly improve YOUR value of your BSUG membership.

Earlier this year, we sent a note to all of our members to ask them, if they still wanted to be a part of our organization. Only 30% of them replied positively. On the other hand I must say that I'm always very happy to see new members registering on our website. We also see our efforts rewarded by seeing those happy faces and receiving thankful comments from those members that attend our 'get togethers', also known as 'member meetings'.

This year we had events that talked about Development tools, eXtreme Programming, the future of all Cincom Smalltalk dialects and Financial applications developed with Smalltalk. With these 4 meetings, we tried to cover all possible kinds of interest angles one can have for Smalltalk. Techies, business people, project and EDP managers, all had a reason to attend at least one of our meetings. We invited the complete financial world to come and see Smalltalk in action with our first night on Smalltalk applications and we asked you for our XP event to 'show your objects', and that resulted into an informal but very valuable meeting for all participants.

The last year has also changed our team of board members. Erik left us in the middle of this year for personal reasons, and Danny Van Welden, who has been with BSUG since its early beginnings in 1992, has recently decided to step out of the board because his professional career was going into another direction and he started to feel to much alienated from the Smalltalk world to continue as a BSUG board member. I certainly want to thank him for all he has done for BSUG. I have not forgotten the energy and sacrifices Danny has made, to make the ESUG user conference in Ghent (1999) into a big success. Without him this would never have been possible. The good news is that we have the pleasure to welcome Michel Tilman as a new board member. Michel has accepted the role of secretary.

Michel is probably one of the godfathers of Smalltalk in Flanders, one of the first true Smalltalk advocates in Belgium. I know Michel from the time he was as an assistant teacher at the Programming Technology Lab of Professor D'Hondt of the VUB. It was 1985, I was still a student, when Michel's enthusiasm about Smalltalk ran through the corridors of building F floor 10, even though the Smalltalk environment of that time was nothing compared to what we know now. At that time you were lucky to have a Mac Plus with 512 K to run Parcplace's wunderkind. I think the younger people among us cannot imagine what such an environment meant in a world where the newest version of DOS was the hype of the year, or the speed of the Turbo Pascal compiler was praised, or the newest Atari computer got a lot of attention for its remarkable sound capabilities, to name a few rarities of that time.

The thing I remember best about Smalltalk at that time was the Smalltalk-80 book of Adele Goldberg and Brian Robson that I needed for the optional course I had chosen during that same year. I bought the book in a small and fluffy bookstore, somewhere in the suburbs of Brussels. This was the bookstore where all VUB students went when they needed books about state of the art software technology. I remember I was very pleased to find a copy of the book there. I took it home as my treasure and there I immediately started reading it. I can lively remember that there was something peculiar with the smell of the book. It was such an attractive smell, that I couldn't put it away and wanted to put my nose in it all the time. The simplicity of the concepts and the clear, minimalist and obvious way in which these concepts were explained really got to me. I'm not a person that likes to read but this book was different. It opened a new world. A world that was simple but powerful, clear and concise, and it smelled wonderful. Also, the book was pleasant to hold. I enjoyed taking it from the shelf and putting it on again. I didn't know were it would bring me at that time, and I couldn't know that after 15 years, Michel would still be doing wonderful things with this powerful language. Regretfully, beautiful things not always get the attention they deserve. And I must admit that the hype around Smalltalk is slowly fading away, but, in all these years it has been a great tool for great minds to build great things, and that didn't stop, it is still going on.

Last year, the Smalltalk vendors did their best to show they are still around. Cincom asked his customers for their needs, since they promised to have a more customer-oriented policy for their products. They also announced to replace the ENVY system with their own Store product. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen promising news about Squeak in the media, but it must have been many times that I felt that if Smalltalk needed a new élan, Squeak is certainly realizing that. Especially the 'shows' given by people from Disney labs all over the world are impressive. IBM again presented a new version of its VisualAge for Smalltalk product, despite the fact that it seems they have killed all their Smalltalk marketeers with a shot in the neck. Existing customers though, continue to enjoy the advantages of one of the most professional development environments on the market today. Also the smaller vendors didn't stop evolving their products, MT Smalltalk, Dolphin, … they all announced new versions of their environment this year

What disappoints me a little bit sometimes is that all these different dialects have their own proponents, but very few Smalltalkers ever took the effort to look at one of the other dialects in greater detail. Nevertheless, to my humble opinion, every dialect has its own strengths and weaknesses, and much could be learned by studying some of those other dialects. The current reality is that most Smalltalkers still believe that their Smalltalk is the one and only best. Let us hope that this doesn't mean that Smalltalkers don't want to be part of a Smalltalk community or that they don't believe in learning from other people's code. I like to believe that Smalltalkers are not just soldiers of a vendor, because we can never beat the Microsoft army in that way, we will have to be smarter and there is no doubt that we are.

On the European Smalltalk Scene, the ESUG had another successful year with a very much appreciated user conference in Southampton, England, despite the organizational problems that occurred after The Object People had called off their support at the last moment. At the conference ESUG had the honor to welcome some 'Camp Smalltalk people'. Together with the other speakers, they turned this eighth user conference into a highly appreciated event (http://www.esug.org).

Let me also note that STIC, a vendor-neutral and international non-profit organization that favors Smalltalk, had a serious reorganization and is now up and running again. If you want to know more about their new plans and hopes, visit their completely restyled website (http://www.stic.org).

The board has decided to concentrate its efforts for this year on 3 goals. First and foremost, we would like to know you, our members, better. We also hope to bring our members closer together. Having good communication and mutual understanding is, to our opinion, key for the success of BSUG. In practice this means that you will get more informal sessions (a la 'show your objects'…). Second point on our agenda this year is to attract new members. We think these new members can be found among students and we will try to reach these people in an appropriate way. And the last point on our list is to broaden the visibility of our organization, both inside the Smalltalk community and outside. We are thinking in this respect about publications in the press and postings on mailing lists.

Beside these 3 ambitious goals, we will continue to maintain our frequently updated website. Let me thank our webmaster once again here, since we probably have the most lively and up to date user group website on the net.

Finally I would like to thank all members of the board, for standing next to me in moments of doubt, and spending time to make this organization into one of the best-organized non-profit user groups in the world.

15 February 2001