On 1 December 2012 20:22, Sebastian Nozzi <[email protected]> wrote: > 2012/12/1 Sven Van Caekenberghe <[email protected]>: >> IMO, the secret of Smalltalk is a delicate combination of elements, take >> some out and the magic is gone. > > Fully agree. Only a "pure" or "classical" Smalltalk would give you > that "magic", the true "experience". > > But I think, and hope, that the Redline developers are aware of that. > I can imagine that they are trading off some of the "experience" in > order to gain library support and toolchain integration (like > deploying to heroku, in this case). > >> Java/JVM makes a distinction between int and Integer (and so on), cannot add >> methods to closed classes, >> has some meta capacity but not all, needs much more typing, cannot change >> many things at run time, and so … > > Yes, ok, but you are comparing Java to Smalltalk, which is not the > case. You have languages running on top of the JVM, like JRuby, that > also kind of conform to the Smalltalk idea (no primitives, everything > is an object, you can modify classes at runtime, extend/open them, > etc.) > >> The question is: how much do you need for it to be this magical Smalltalk >> thing ? > > The question is: how much of the "magic" of Smalltalk can you live > WITHOUT. If your answer is "zero" then Redline is clearly not for you > ;-) > >> Objective-C is also clearly Smalltalk inspired, > > Being it a compied language, for me the experience is also lacking.
Smalltalk _is_ compiled. >> more so than Java, (dynamic typing / messaging) >> but you can hardly call it a real Smalltalk system/experience. > > Yes, completely agree. For me just because it has to be compiled. The > second I have to re-start the application to see the changes reflected > the magic is gone. If I cannot interact with objects, add/remove > methods/variables, change the class hierachy, etc. while running, the > magick is gone. Nothing beats Smalltalk's "experience". But this is, I think, the nub of your argument: it's not about compiling or interpreting. It's about the interaction with a running system versus write-run-pray. Ruby is in many ways very close to Smalltalk (even though it has a horrific syntax), but the usual way of writing it (in my experience at least) is much like working in Java: write something, run something, examine the output. frank > Cheers, > > Sebastian >
