On 21/12/2010, at 12:00 PM, Steve Wart wrote: > In fact, I don't really care about platform independence. At all. > > But you must know the edit, compile, download loop is not the most > efficient way to be doing things. We do it because the platform > demands it, and it's the best way to deliver quality to the end-user. > The point of Smalltalk to me is that the programmer is the end-user, > and very few of the dynamic languages I've seen really live up to that > standard.
Yeah, I don't really care about platform independence, either... however... I really like the way smalltalk does the "edit compile download" loop you talk about - rather than compile all at once, it does bit by bit compilation. That's just lovely. Every time you save your work, it gets compiled... that makes so much sense. Each unit of code becomes properly atomic. While I love Smalltalk very much, it makes discovery of itself quite difficult, (the learning curve of its libraries - it's "nouns" if you will - is quite steep)... which is fairly ironic given the intentions of the original creators (I believe they were both to make things easier for users, and to allow a platform for children to discover computers and learn about them more easily). I guess you're using dynamic here to mean encouraging the experimentation and dynamism of the programmer... I think perhaps if I may be so arrogant as to presume I know something here... the issue that I have with Smalltalk is that it doesn't for the idea of Scale very well... which is to say the role of the user isn't catered-to very well. In other words, the simple-requirements general-use computer user who doesn't want to know much about computers and the mad scientist who needs to know about the inner workings are in the same place... ... and that place is that they both need to "KNOW" everything to use the computer... Julian. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
