The SOM Family: Virtual Machines for Teaching and Research

The talk gives an overview of the development of a family of Smalltalk virtual machine implementations called SOM (Simple Object Machine). The SOM VM, originating from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, has been ported to several programming languages, exploring different objectives. All of the VM implementations focus on providing an easily accessible workbench for teaching, but have also turned out to be a viable research platform. In this talk, each of the SOM VMs will be briefly described along with the results that were achieved in applying it in teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels as well as research.