Am 30.06.2011 um 17:53 schrieb Janko Mivšek:
> S, Norbert Hartl piše:
>
>> Am 30.06.2011 um 17:23 schrieb Stéphane Ducasse:
>
>>>>> apparently people get excited by nodeJS and I would like to know the
>>>>> equivalence of
>
>>>> What does it mean?
>
>>> in Pharo.. how do you have the same:
>
>> It depends what is in your head when you wrote this. The code snippet
>> doesn't tell that much. Registering a Block for execution on request is
>> probably not what makes you excited about. What is exciting about it is that
>> javascript is written in a strictly asynchronous manner (event driven) and
>> that matches perfectly the implementation with asynchronous I/O. Suddenly
>> you can write programs they way you ever wanted it. And lucky for us
>> smalltalk itself is event driven so it can go there easily, too. Well,
>> easily would mean to have support for asynchronous I/O in the vm (file
>> operations) and in the socket plugin at least.
>
> Because I'm just working on asynchronous no-blocking node.js like
> control flow in Aida, I can say that this is really natural to Smalltalk
> with its closures, much more than so called callbacks in JavaScript. In
> Smalltalk it is more readable and you hardly notice the difference to
> the normal Smalltalk code, while in JavaScript those callbacks are a bit
> hard to grasp and understand. From non seasoned programmer perspective,
> that is.
>
Can you elaborate on this? I agree that one of the biggest flaws in javascript
is that you have to write function() {} to use a closure which prevents its
usage in a lot of cases, e.g. in filter functions etc. It is just ugly and
nobody likes it. The second point is that you need to preserve this in
javascript manually if you wish to use it in closures.
Apart from that I can see a single difference between the two. Callbacks are
natural to javascript because most usage pattern use it. Closures are natural
to smalltalk because it just needs [ ] and it is well used throughout the class
library.
Norbert
