Steve Dekorte wrote on Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:22:29 -0700
On 2010-07-10, at 12:25 AM, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote:
For quite some time I've been pondering the duality of the class/instance
and
method/context relations. In some sense, a context is an object created by
instantiating its method, much like a normal object is instantiated from
its class...
Self does just that:
http://labs.oracle.com/self/language.html
Io (following Self's example) does as well. In this recent video:
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop
Indeed, but these two languages are, perhaps, even better examples:
http://www.daimi.au.dk/~beta/
http://www.erights.org/elang/index.html
Ralph Johnson talks about how long it takes for computing culture to absorb
new
ideas (in his example, things like OO, garbage collection and dynamic message
passing) despite them being obvious next steps in retrospect. I think
prototypes
could also be an example of this.
It seems as if each computing culture fails to establish a measure for it's
own goals
which leaves it with no means of critically analyzing it's assumptions
resulting in the
technical equivalent of religious dogma. From this perspective, new technical
cultures
are more like religious reform movements than new scientific theories which
are
measured by agreement with experiment. e.g. had the Smalltalk community said
if it
can reduce the overall code X without a performance cost Y it's better,
perhaps
prototypes would have been adopted long ago.
When I think about the issue of FONC goals, I always remember Alan's
supersized dog house vs Empire State Building illustration. It isn't
about making it smaller (though I also love that - ColorForth is one of
my favorite systems) but making it understandable so it can be built by
humans in such a way that it can become vast. Like the Internet.
The other day I saw on the local news a three story building collapse as
if it had been imploded on purpose. The people who built it had
initially made just one floor, and it worked great. Then they added a
second floor, and it was nice. Now they were shocked that having a third
floor, which looked exactly like the original two, brought down the
whole thing. Neither architecture nor engineering were part of this
story, as far as I could tell. But this could be said of essentially all
programmers, computer scientists and software engineers that I know.
Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers
write programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy
civilization.
-- Jecel
___
fonc mailing list
fonc@vpri.org
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
