[Newbies] I don't get it

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 22.06.2011, at 12:05, David Corking wrote:

> 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.)

Indeed, and thanks for pointing it out. Adding instance-specific methods isn't hard to do in Squeak (Etoys does it), although modifying method-lookup to implement delegation is more challenging.

It seems, however, that prototypes is not really what Jim and Trygve are aiming at. The paper instead mentions Traits, which indeed add a lot of flexibility to the traditional Smalltalk class model:

	http://www.artima.com/articles/dci_vision.html

- Bert -