[Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms

Benjamin L. Russell DekuDekuplex at Yahoo.com
Fri Jul 24 06:37:04 UTC 2009


On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:25:34 +0530, "K. K. Subramaniam"
<subbukk at gmail.com> wrote:

>Concepts in Squeak have their origins 
>in biology rather than in computational math. The boundary between 'hardware' 
>and 'software' is blurry. See the reading list at
>   http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
>particularly "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.

Richard O'Keefe refutes this claim in his post [1] "Re: Re: [Haskell]
Re: 20 years ago," dated "2009-07-16 01:38:14 GMT," on the
Haskell-Cafe mailing list (see
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61329);
_viz._:

>>> Concepts in Squeak [a dialect and implementation of Smalltalk] have
>> their origins
>>> in biology rather than in computational math....
>
>That posting is wrong.
>
>Smalltalk's roots are very firmly planted in Lisp,
>with perhaps a touch of Logo (which also had its roots in Lisp).
>The classic Smalltalk-76 paper even contains a meta-circular
>interpreter, which I found reminiscent of the old Lisp one.
>The "biological" metaphor in Smalltalk is actually a SOCIAL
>metaphor: sending and receiving messages, and a "social"
>model of agents with memory exchanging messages naturally
>leads to anthropomorphisms.
>
>The other classic OO language, which inspired C++, which
>inspired Java, which inspired C#, is Simula 67, which has
>its roots in Algol 60.  While Simula 67 was sometimes used
>for simulating biological processes, the main background
>was discrete event systems like factories and shops; there
>are no biological metaphors in Simula.

-- Benjamin L. Russell

[1] O'Keefe, Richard. "Re: Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago."
gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 16 July 2009. 24 July 2009.
<http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61329>.
-- 
Benjamin L. Russell  /   DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com
http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/
Translator/Interpreter / Mobile:  +011 81 80-3603-6725
"Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." 
-- Matsuo Basho^ 



More information about the Beginners mailing list