Bruce Cohen

503-313-1218 mailto:BruceCohenPDX@gmail.com

At the moment, I'm a web application developer for Rodgers Instruments, a small company outside of Portland, Oregon, that builds church organs. They used to be pipe organs (and we still sell the pipes), but the sound is all digitally generated these days. I write mostly in Java now, though I occasionally pull out Squeak, dust it off, and play with it for awhile. Right now I'm trying to squeeze Squeak into a project at work, as an embedded hardware controller.

When I first wrote this page, I said the following. Although that was 4 jobs, two companies, and several major life changes ago, what is says about my mental condition is probably still true, or even moreso since I'm up to three personalities with Java ;-)

: I'm the software architect for the Smalltalk interface to the GemStone Object-Oriented database and for the C++ interface too, so either there's a meeting ground between the two languages, or I'm a very schizoid person.

I learned about Smalltalk from AlanKay's article in ScientificAmerican in the late '70s, and first used it on a MagnoliaWorkstation in the early '80s while trying to learn how other people design windowing systems so I could design one for a Tektronix workstation (thank you RogerBates).

Smalltalk turned out to be a good place to start with objects: I subsequently learned (and taught) C++ and I think that was the right order. My advice is to learn as many OO languages as you can, and try to learn from the contrasts among them.

-- Bruce Cohen

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