On Oct 4, 2012, at 8:02 AM, Marcus Denker <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Now there are two philosophies
>
> 1) we load the new in addition. It even is compatible to many different
> versions of the System, and everyone uses it
> in new code. But the sytem can not use it, as the developer of course wants
> to load the latest version of this independendly
> develpopped library. Some people requested that for FileSystem, and we
> renamed all classes so that they can continue
> to load the code themselves.
This actually is interesting, these two philosophies...
1) The Addition View
Smalltalk is perfect and finished. Everything we do we do "on top". If we
implement Morphic, we keep MVC. Things like
FileSystem code is there as an additonal library.
When doing research, the picture you have is not that of a System that you
improve to make a new System that makes
the next research easier. No. You do something *on top*, and throw it away
after.
2) The System View
I think some people's brain kind of got a hickup when they looked at instances
of Class and saw that they just use standard
libraries. MethodDictionay is a Dictionary... there is no special "I wrote
everyhting again because I am clever!" code
even deep in the system. That is one of the things that makes Smalltalk
powerful!
The main reason is that it created a feedback loop: We improve something for an
application. But then, instead of throwing
it away, we *apply* that improvement to the *whole* system. The system gets
better (faster, smaller). And its expressiveness
is improved: the next developer can just *use* the improvement and put the time
into something else.
Especially in Research, this is quite important: You can't publish things that
have already been done. Time is limited (just 3-4 years
to do a PhD...). So if the guy has to constantly start from scratch, this gets
very hard after just some interations. Yet, when the System
itself improves... the picture here is that of a mountain: We can always climb
up from the valley deep down, or we can build base camps.
Who will do better?
I think we are starting to (slowly) see this with Pharo. E.g. the on-demand
loading of the .sources. It uses Zinc and FileSystem, it's just a
couple of lines of code. Yes, you could have done it before. But would anyone
do it? Of course not. (just a very trivial example).
Marcus
--
Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de
