David Siegel will present next on Wednesday, December 7th, 2005. Here is the abstract and bio:

Abstract:

An introduction to a family of algorithms whose uses include approximate string matching, spelling correction, synchronizing sequences, and analysis of DNA and protein data.

Bio:

David Siegel has been working with objects for over twenty years. His interests include language design, algorithms, data structures, persistence and concurrency.

If I may I would like to elaborate a bit further on our colleague. David is one of our long standing regulars at NYC Smalltalk. As a matter of fact, many of David’s twenty years include quite a bit of Smalltalk and quite a bit of OODMS specifically Gemstone. Its probably accurate to say that he is “famous” for his work as one of the main architects on large Gemstone project but I’m not going to mention the name of said project since he does not bring it up.

Elegant OO designs in languages as Smalltalk can often make up for the brute force approaches that is typical to “closer to the metal” languages. Isolating the right algorithm primitives and implementing just those in an External C library can provide for an implementation that meets performance requirements but also one that is extensible. Of course, we believe that using Smalltalk just makes all of the above easier .

BTW, a great follow up presentation would be one that deals with the VisualWorks pluging framework i.e. that framework which allows one to code Smalltalk and then compile it to C and subsequently make it accessible to the virtual machine.

Directions to the meeting can be found on our wiki.