Alan,
Teach me to be an English major back in the 60s instead of delving into the computer realm. It took me until the late 70s to get THERE.
APL was always a mystery to me: it's coding into symbols, while conceptually rich, was too high a price of admission for me, perhaps because the same learning disability that makes foreign languages so difficult for me was invoked in the same way.
Thank you for your remarks and insights. I enjoy Squeak and this news group because it always seems to operate where my mind ought to be. Which makes it both rare and beyond price.
Adam
On 8/29/98 at 4:37 PM, alank@wdi.disney.com (Alan Kay) wrote:
This was a dream of the sixties, and the very first working version of Smalltalk (72) manifested this dream. It was set up so that each object could easily implement its own grammar for receiving messages. This allowed many "small languages" to be developed and mixed. The expressivity was very high. Unfortunately, we forgot that languages are also for communication -- for being read, not just for being written -- and what we quickly wound up with was a Tower of Babel -- as least as far as people who were trying to learn from our code were concerned. For Smalltalk-76 we decided that the language should be always be readable, and that the extensibility that was really needed was in expressing meanings.