Advanced OOP design with Smalltalk and Stéphane Ducasse

I've just been in the first lecture of Dr Ducasse's course on advanced OOP design here in Barcelona.

And I've to say it's been GREAT. A guru that talks with hackers in mind, being a great one himself. And with lots of good points in the prespective one should care about when entering a new world of hacking/amusement.

He started with an introduction to smalltalk while jumping back and forth to meta-level . We already saw the boolean implementation in the first 20 minutes, and jumped to ifTrue:ifFalse: implementation.

During the talk, he spoke about some real cases he encountered in his life, talking about india, china, project costs in "Old Europe" vs eastern, and the importance of having a delta that makes you different from your co-workers (oponents?). I've always thought like that too, so this guy seems really cool to me :).

On the technical side, He talked about the importance of taking advantage of the object system, and keep in mind that the dispatcher on message sends act as case statements, so we should use them as such. Minimizing logic in our code make it faster, more solid, and prettier.

We're following these slides mixed with these others.

While doing the lecture, he mentioned some cool books, some of them I already heard about (even read them), but others not, so I'm afraid my TOREAD list is about to grow a bit.

All in all, I had a really good time, and it's been only the first class!. It seems I'll be hacking some smalltalk in near future :)

Thanks to Jordi Delgado for making this possible, and to Stéphane for coming to Barcelona and sharing his knowledge.

--EDIT--
Btw, if you don't know what is smalltalk nor who Stéphane Ducasse is, you should check pharo and you'll get a fair idea of what's smalltalk about and you'll be watching what is Stef working on.