Secondly, the real Scott will be sharing Wednesday’s MIX keynote with Ray Ozzie and Dean Hachamovitch (GM for Internet Explorer). If you’re into web development at all, that keynote is going to be required viewing - we’ve got lots of new announcements, some great demos, and one or two surprises. You can watch the keynote live at 9:30am Pacific / 5:30pm GMT by clicking on one of the following three streams: 750kbps, 300kbps, 100kbps.
So as many of you will know I’ve been a *HUGE* fan of both Peter Fisk and his Vista Smalltalk project here on this blog. The problem is that, as some of you will have noticed, as of July 5th, 2007 there’s been no sign nor trace of Peter OR Vista Smalltalk. Well, that’s not completely true. I did exchange a few emails with Peter in or around August of last year, all of which seem to have suggested that both he and Vista Smalltalk would reappear after he finished a “move to a new city” and the next release of Silverlight came into being.
But that release came and went with September of last year, yet no sign of Peter or VST resurfacing for air. When I queried the Vista Smalltalk list on September 19th regarding the whereabouts of Peter, I got the following in reply a day later from Gal Zsolt, another VST list member,
Maybe he waits for final Silverlight 1.1.
>>I am in the process of moving to Calgary, Alberta and I will have very little time available for the next couple of weeks.
>>There are some problems with my control library (eg ListBox) on certain machines/browsers which I have been unable
>>to correct so far. Microsoft will soon be releasing a new DLR with (AFIK) their own control library.
>>Once they release the next Silverlight 1.1 (beta?), I will release a Smalltalk for it.”
While I have absolutely *ZERO* knowledge as to whether or not the prediction that follows at the end of this post has any bearing on reality, it’s hard not to allow the conspiracy theorist side of me — a side in which is basically non-existent except for the occasional “you know, there’s just too much to this for it NOT to be seen as a potential conspiracy.” — to make itself known when you consider the fact that Peter had been building and blogging about Vista Smalltalk since July of 2006, posting a new entry — on average — what seemed to be about once every three days ever since.
Of course when you add the following comment from Jim Hugunin to the list, you can’t help but wonder if MSFT didn’t take heed to James Governor’s advice to Sun Microsystems, sending the Mothership up North to snatch up Peter before Sun or anyone else had a chance to gather their bearings and make attempt to do the same.
Wow, that looks cool! I’m stunned you were able to get this far already after we just released code on Monday.
Comment by Jim Hugunin — May 3, 2007 @ 6:59 pm
So to recap,
* Peter began building and blogging about Vista Smalltalk in July of 2006.
* He wrote a new entry about once every three days for ~365 days thereafter.
* In February of 2007, James Governor wrote an entry, impressed by Peter’s work on VST, suggesting that Sun Microsystems snatch him up as quickly as possible.
* After the initial release of the DLR at MIX 07 at the end of April, Peter began work on a DLR-based version of VST, releasing the first version only a few days after the DLR code base became available.
* In May Jim Hugunin took notice, impressed by his progress in such a short space of time.
* Peter continued work on the DLR-based VST, writing new entries every couple of days reporting progress until his last entry on July 5th, 2007, ~two months after Jim Hugunin posted the above comment.
* Other than a few emails here and there soon after the last entry was posted and a stab-in-the-dark reply to my “What happened to Peter?” inquiry to the VST list, signs of life from both Peter and Vista Smalltalk have been non-existent ever since.
* Yesterday afternoon Tim Sneath made a post which stated “If you’re into web development at all, that keynote is going to be required viewing - we’ve got lots of new announcements, some great demos, and one or two surprises.” (emphasis mine)
Could one or two of those surprises be a re-entry of Peter Fisk and/or Vista Smalltalk in the form of IronSmalltalk? As already mentioned, I personally have absolutely no clue, but I’ve been wanting to write about this prediction since about last September when it first occurred to me their could be more to Peter’s “disappearance” than just a sudden and immediate disinterest in continuing forward with the development of Vista Smalltalk.
Anybody else have some fuel to add to the PF/VST conspiracy fire and/or have some predictions of your own you’d like to make?
Either way, tomorrow should be a pretty interesting day for those of us excited about what the Silverlight future might hold. So until then,
Bye :D
