On 23/06/2011, at 12:35 PM, Max OrHai wrote: > People who want a "small" language should be prepared to be somewhat > idiosyncratic, if they want to express "big" or complex programs. I mean > 'language' here not just in terms of a programming language definition but > rather to mean all constructs (or, more fundamentally, concepts and > conventions) which are shared, which belong in some sense to a culture rather > than an individual. If they don't enlarge the language (usually via some > library) they enlarge their personal idiom instead, which may not be as > "portable". Progress depends on the ability of individuals to nonetheless > communicate these new ideas 'uphill' so to speak, but more immediately on the > ability to make them, so as to make them better. Some leverage here may be > available through improvements in the notion of expressivity itself. There is > a wonderfully large number of experiments being done in dynamic language > design these days, from Ruby to REBOL... If more of them would take what I'd > say is the major lesson of Smalltalk and become fully integrated personal > computing environments, rather than living off the previous generation's > operating systems, perhaps they might be able to move some of the > uncomfortable fixed points of usability and complexity, as well as gain more > user-programmers altogether. I think FONC is, at least, a pointer in the > right direction; a reminder that there's plenty of room out there beyond the > familiar. >
So, by that reasoning, GNU SmallTalk doesn't exhibit what you'd express as being the "major lesson from SmallTalk"? Interestingly, one of the most irritating things for me was the User Interface when I first came to Squeak, having programmed in GemStone SmallTalk for a number of years (which we were programming via snippets plugged into HTML, and sometimes via GemStone/J, on a mac natively, not inside a SmallTalk environment at all). At that point I had experience in AmigaDOS, MacOS (pre X), Windows 95, NT and GEOS (commodore 64 based GUI) would you believe... Squeak was supremely irritating for two reasons: Firstly, the UI was completely different without having any easy way to say "hey, I'm a n00b, turn on n00b mode so I can learn this thing", and second it seemed far too easy to make irreparable damage, or even lose what I was doing... (probably due to point 1). So I'd be very much against your "build the whole world so you can express the language" philosophy. Potentially, though, I'd say having the idea of a SmallTalk-like image loaded into a fully graphical interface AS AN OPTION is awesome... I'd love to have a visual debugger for my Ruby code the likes of the SmallTalk ones... (to a degree, MagLev kind of allows this as a possibility). My issue seems to be that if you change the language at a base level while in one of those environments, you kind of break everything... don't you? They don't really lead to experimentation very well. Julian. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
