Hi Nick, On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 12:34 AM, Nicholas Geti <[email protected]> wrote: > Long time no see! Glad to have you back. >
Thanks, I like to pop in, after the passage of time, to see the place much the same as I left it before. It's reassuring, seeing the old familiar names, and the same curiously recurring threads, like watching the sun rising in the east on a morning when you're acutely aware of your mind-bogglingly tiny yet paradoxically indispensable role in the cosmos. ;) <NF> As is well known in these parts, I have never really been a ProFoxer, per se, despite my antiquarian interest in the language. Lately I'm on a Smalltalk kick, if you can believe it. What a fun language. I can't believe I haven't had a Smalltalk Phase sooner. I know people rave (or rant) about it's maniacally purist approach to OO, but that isn't even the part I like best about it. (Actually I'm partial to pure functional languages most of the time these multi-core days.) It's the fact you're interacting with a live system of objects and can, at will, craft all of them to your liking, for the task at hand. Coding in Smalltalk is a bit like sculpting and even more fun than coding in Ruby, which I have always enjoyed -- and no wonder, it owes all its fun features to Smalltalk. Objective-C -- the official language of Mac -- is heavily influenced by Smalltalk (and now that I understand Smalltalk, Objective-C's syntax no longer offends me). If you're looking for something that is a viable development environment to create dynamic small business apps for Windows, and affordable to boot, check out Dolphin Smalltalk at www.object-arts.com. If you're more free, cross-platform, open source oriented, there's Squeak (www.squeak.org) and Pharo (www.pharo-project.org). I prefer Pharo, but it's based on Squeak anyway. Squeak is also the basis for a program designed to teach programming to kids called Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu). If you have kids (or grand kids), and you want to get them interested in programming, but their not quite ready for text-based coding, you have GOT to get them into Scratch. Actually this is what lead me to "discover" Smalltalk, I was digging under the hood of Scratch so I could change something about it for my sons. If you have pictures of Richard Stallman on your wall surrounded by hearts and flowers, and you have some spare time between Occupy Wall Street rallies, then there's GNU Smalltalk (which is actually quite impressive in its own way, I'm really impressed with its virtual machine implementation). And finally: If you're more into the Enterprisey side of things and can afford it, then there's CinCom Smalltalk. It's really powerful and can connect to anything, anywhere, on any platform, as well. Quite a neat selection of alternatives, overall (and I didn't even mention Smalltalk MT, ST/X, GEMSTONE/GLASS, and a couple others). The language is as young today as it was 30 years ago. Aside from influencing every other so-called OO language in existence, and especially Ruby and Objective-C, it's also the language that made MVC and Unit Testing/Test First the prevailing standards that they are. Despite a not very huge developer base, Smalltalk deserves a look. </NF> Sorry for the inadvertent Smalltalk speech there, which I surrounded with NF tags despite this being an OT thread. I meant to go on another related Obama rant of some kind but got side-tracked by a rare feeling of joy at something... I don't feel positive about anything when my mind is looking at politics and the unravelling of Western civilization right before our eyes. Would that we could throw the whole damn charade right in the debugger, fix it right on the spot, deleting the offending lines of code to insert a better algorithm, and resume execution the way it was supposed to work, just like you mend code in Smalltalk... ;) - Publius > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Publius Maximus" <[email protected]> > To: "ProFox Email List" <[email protected]> > Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2011 10:10 AM > Subject: Re: [OT] Obama's own words says he is a communist > _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/CAEUt0LDu2vm+BcD9kGE1oK0n_ww2BGKdt=Yx4W=cnwfjrcf...@mail.gmail.com ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
