Briefly about me
I am 24 years old and am living in Berlin, Germany. I speak German and English, learned French in school but didn't practice since. And, being in Tartu at the moment, I also learned some Estonian.
About my study
I'm a BSc in IT Systems Engineering, Potsdam University, Germany, and currently in my second semester of Master. I am currently on an Erasmus study exchange (until end of June) in Tartu, Estonia.
My interests
I'm interested in different programming languages and the stresses they have on some aspect of the programming process. I'm also interested in Mathematics, although I do not have heard many lectures about higher/abstract mathematics.
I have not yet decided which topics to specialize in but am rather visiting many different lectures, e.g. cryptographic protocols, semantics of programming languages, parallel programming languages, aspect oriented programming, or machine learning.
My non-Smalltalk experiences so far
Before starting my studies, I learned PHP.
In my Bachelor studies, we had the standard tour around C, Java, Python, Ruby, some Scheme and very little Prolog.
I also know some JavaScript (see also Smalltalk experience part).
In this semester, I'm attending a course about Concurrent Programming Languages, and am learning Oz (declarative programming) and maybe later Clojure (the assistant was not sure as to which language comes next: Erlang or Haskel would also be possible).
In the course Machine Learning, I use Gnu R. Because this course is practice oriented, the weekly exercises are quite extensive.
My Smalltalk experiences so far
At the my faculty, there is the chair of Prof. Hirschfeld, which uses Squeak Smalltalk for education extensively. During one of their courses I also got in touch with Seaside. During another, I fixed a bug in the Squeak compiler(bug 7572).
My Bachelor thesis was about translating Smalltalk to JavaScript (-> Orca).
I have been attending the 'Deep into Smalltalk' conference. I am using Pharo Smalltalk for doing homeworks in e.g. 'Advanced Algorithmics' lecture or Bioinformatics. (If the language can be chosen by me.)
Why am I interested in Smalltalk?
The way Smalltalk stresses the collaboration of objects and the act of message sends is quite compelling to me. I also like the Squeak/Pharo-IDE, because it does not organize code in files, like so many other languages do and which subsequently feels somehow antique to me, now that I know another way to do it.
Will I stay with Smalltalk after the project is finished?
I plan to do so.
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