Steve Dekorte wrote on Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:22:29 -0700 > On 2010-07-10, at 12:25 AM, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote: > > For quite some time I've been pondering the duality of the class/instance > > and > > method/context relations. In some sense, a context is an object created by > > instantiating its method, much like a normal object is instantiated from > > its class... > > > Self does just that: > > http://labs.oracle.com/self/language.html > > Io (following Self's example) does as well. In this recent video: > > http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop
Indeed, but these two languages are, perhaps, even better examples: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~beta/ http://www.erights.org/elang/index.html > Ralph Johnson talks about how long it takes for computing culture to absorb > new > ideas (in his example, things like OO, garbage collection and dynamic message > passing) despite them being obvious next steps in retrospect. I think > prototypes > could also be an example of this. > > It seems as if each computing culture fails to establish a measure for it's > own goals > which leaves it with no means of critically analyzing it's assumptions > resulting in the > technical equivalent of religious dogma. From this perspective, new technical > cultures > are more like religious reform movements than new scientific theories which > are > measured by agreement with experiment. e.g. had the Smalltalk community said > "if it > can reduce the overall code >X without a performance cost >Y" it's better, > perhaps > prototypes would have been adopted long ago. When I think about the issue of FONC goals, I always remember Alan's "supersized dog house vs Empire State Building" illustration. It isn't about making it smaller (though I also love that - ColorForth is one of my favorite systems) but making it understandable so it can be built by humans in such a way that it can become vast. Like the Internet. The other day I saw on the local news a three story building collapse as if it had been imploded on purpose. The people who built it had initially made just one floor, and it worked great. Then they added a second floor, and it was nice. Now they were shocked that having a third floor, which looked exactly like the original two, brought down the whole thing. Neither architecture nor engineering were part of this story, as far as I could tell. But this could be said of essentially all programmers, computer scientists and "software engineers" that I know. Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. -- Jecel _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
