Smalltalk, Blocks, and the Origins of Eclipse Collections

An airhacks.fm conversation with Donald Raab about: the Epson HX-20 as the world's first laptop and learning Basic , an acoustic coupler modem, the Atari 2600 and Pitfall , Montezuma's Revenge, Apple II clones and the Franklin Ace, running a bulletin board system, learning BASIC, Pascal, fortran , COBOL , Turbo prolog and Turbo Pascal , dBASE III Plus as language and database management system, DBF file format by Ashton-Tate, Clipper by Nantucket as a dBASE compiler with Blinker linker, T-Browse and cursor-based table access, FoxPro and the x-based language family, NDX/NTX/CDX index formats, SQLJ embedded SQL, Paradox and Delphi , learning Smalltalk at IBM Object Technology University, Alan Kay and pure object orientation, blocks as lambdas in Smalltalk and Clipper (via the Classy library), ENVY version control with method-level editions, VisualAge for Smalltalk and VisualAge for Java , method categories for organizing methods, migrating a Clipper application to Java using interfaces and static methods in a procedural style, transparent persistence with TopLink and EclipseLink , memory constraints in 32-bit Java on Solaris, building a custom caching framework, the origins of Eclipse Collections in 2004, waiting ten years for lambdas, the JSR 335 expert group with Brian Goetz, select/collect/inject versus filter/map/reduce, eager methods on collections versus lazy streams, code folding regions in IntelliJ to simulate method categories, the book "Eclipse Collections Categorically", JRuby and Asciidoctor , meeting Yukihiro Matsumoto at OOPSLA 2002 Donald Raab on twitter: @TheDonRaab