Paolo Bonzini wrote: >> Put too much emphasis on tools and you'll have a language that will >> be barely usable *without* them. > > This is a bold statement, and I want to understand more of it. > How can you be sure? Do you consider Ruby or Python barely usable > without tools?
Heh. It's a bold statement, I agree. No, I do not consider Python to be useless without tools. (I have about 5 minutes of experience with Ruby, so actually I can't say much about it.) In fact, interestingly enough, I just realized that the only tools that I use with Python is my text editor and Python itself. I feel that a language such as Python was primarily designed to be a language that the authors themselves would want to use. I don't think they were guided by how easy it will be for tool writers to do their job, except for as far as the parser and compiler is concerned. If a system is designed with knowledge about itself and exposes that knowledge, every tool that needs such knowledge can be implemented from within that system. Which is why I don't really need anything else than a text editor and Python. Hell, I don't even need the text editor. >> The language that it's being turned into is not that language. > > This is also a bold statement. Please expand on it, I'm genuinely > interested (they even deserved a subject change!). > It's entirely my own opinion and it's based on one simple fact: I wouldn't use it. I find that the changes you're proposing address some of the things that I like most about Smalltalk (extreme simplicity, one paradigm) and languages such as Python (the "scripting" aspect), and I find that I don't like those changes. If Smalltalk had been the language you're trying to implement when I started taking interest in it, I wouldn't even bother learning it. In fact, I wouldn't have taken interest in it in the first place! And, naturally, that is why I don't see potential in that language, but again it is my opinion. Jānis _______________________________________________ help-smalltalk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-smalltalk
