Sig, Lack of precedence *is* a weakness of the language and ridiculing someone who cites it won't help anything. IMHO, the best response we have is that consistency is among Smalltalk's great strengths, and arithmetic precedence was and remains a deliberate casualty of that design goal. I am not saying we should change the situation, but grant the point.
If the other side is not willing to accept an extra set of parentheses here and there in the name of consistency, you might subsequently try pointing out that a nice mix is to do logic, memory management and GUI implementation in Smalltalk and to do number crunching in C++ with the functions exposed as extern "C". Not only is it faster than a pure-Smalltalk solution, the equations translate much as one exects, and C's memory management woes are largely irrelevant. Precedence was indeed a pain to learn as a child, but we all did learn it, and the best of us will at times get bitten when the compter does not "know" those same rules. The trick, is to respectfully challenge people to try this wonderful system that is nice enough on balance to get people to re-think arithmetic - or at least pitch it that way. Bill -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Igor Stasenko Sent: Sunday, April 18, 2010 11:07 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] [Pharo-users] [ANN] Pharo 1.0 released! On 16 April 2010 13:10, Henrik Johansen <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Apr 15, 2010, at 10:33 31PM, Adrian Lienhard wrote: > >> Thanks, Daniel, for posting on reddit! We currently are almost at the top of >> the list... >> >> >> Cheers, >> Adrian > > Gotta love reddit... > 3 most repeated/discussed topics in comments: > - "I don't know what Smalltalk is, and the site doesn't tell me, not even > the about page!" > - "SUCKS, I can't use my favourite text-editor and git!" > - "1 + 2 * 3 = 9 WTF SMALLTALK" > Oh yeah.. there are two guys battling to the death, each defending own point.. The guy who claims that precedence rules is a must, must be forgot, how much pain it was took to learn them in a childhood :) > :D > > Cheers, > Henry > > > _______________________________________________ > Pharo-project mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project > -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig. _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
