On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 11:05 AM, DeNigris Sean <[email protected]> wrote: > > After reading many of the LISP suggestions (thanks), the primary features > seem to me to be: > > I'm not sure where, if at all, security comes in
Security was, quite understandably, not a major design constraint of most earlier languages. It falls near 'nowhere to be found' for both Lisp and Smalltalk. But languages such as Gilad Bracha's Newspeak, which heavily inspired from Smalltalk, certainly has a security focus. > > The big idea is "messaging" 'Messaging' is a problem child of its own. It forces us to write highly stateful applications, in order to coordinate or orchestrate multiple devices. Resulting applications are neither resilient nor robust: a missed, lost, dropped, or delayed message can cause applications to behave unexpectedly, with no recovery in sight. Nah, the key idea was stated just a little later in the same paragraph: Alan Kay wrote (in 1998): > The key in making great and growable systems is much > more to design how its modules communicate rather than > what their internal properties and behaviors should be. There are a lot of alternatives to messaging as a basis for composition of and communication between modules, and I think pursuing them is necessary if we're to see greater and more scalable systems than we have today. > > "I would say that a system that allowed other metathings to be done in the > ordinary course of programming... is a bad design." > > Is this a problem with LISP, where a macro can e.g. magically change what > gets passed to the evaluator? Not quite. Macros are typically just a local restructuring of code - i.e. syntactic sugar for something you could have written anyway. But code-walking macros, and global-state frameworks, and so on are generally not things that should be done in the ordinary course of programming. Regards, David _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
