[Newbies] I don't get it

[David Corking]

Erlis  wrote:

> Now I think I start understanding Jim statement, basically the statement is:
> Smalltalk (the language) adopted the classical way of OO instead the
> prototype way, so I don't have all the plasticity I was expecting...
>
> Do the smalltalkers feel this way?

Perhaps. But Squeakers have access to other languages: notably Etoys.
It isn't often mentioned that Etoys is an implementation of the Self
computation model as a visual programming language for children.
Interestingly, almost any Morphic class can easily become an Etoys
object. (This won't be surprising to those who know that Morphic was
first built for Self.)

B. Blochl wrote:

> But I think all that is a bit off topic on a Smalltalk mail list. But to remember: You had a special
> Croqueford -question I tried to clarify. I think the future mails [s]hould focus on SmallTalk topics.

Not really, in my opinion: this is a Squeak mailing list - not a
Smalltalk one. Squeak has been a fertile platform for language
experimentation. I would love to hear about other classless languages
that have been implemented on Squeak: I think Scratch might be one.

David

p.s. Off-topic: CLOS* is an interesting language inspired by
Smalltalk-80, which is so flexible you might want to think of it as
classless. I have never programmed in it, but its proponents sound
enthusiastic about its malleability.
* 'either one syllable rhyming with "dross", or two syllables as in
"see-loss" ... [W]ith the exception of slot accessors - all of your
application's functionality lives in function and method definitions,
not in classes. It's sometimes appropriate to place methods applicable
to some class into the same file as that class. It's sometimes
appropriate to place all the methods of a generic function into a
single file. There are no language constraints on this. ': Nick Levine
http://cl-cookbook.sourceforge.net/clos-tutorial/index.html