On Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:49:22 -0700, Fabio Filasieno fabio.filasieno@gmail.com wrote:
... the *language* part is actually not all that important.
No it is. And you know it. It's very very important.
But it misses the point. When you talk about most languages, you're JUST talking about the language. That's all there is. Yeah, these days you also get a VM for a lot of languages but it's a separate beast.
You can't discuss, e.g., changing C's syntax and still be talking about C. You can discuss--well, discussions have been had about doing Etoys in Python. You could do all of Squeak in Python, probably, or another dynamic language (perhaps with some minor adjustments) and a remarkably large percentage of the discussion would not change.
I love the Smalltalk syntax and would put it up against any other language, but it's more important that you can change it if you don't.