On Tue, 26 Feb 2002 Torsten.Bergmann at phaidros.com wrote:

> I completely agree with Jim. We should thank David for sharing
> his knowledge. Smallscript is a cool system and definitely the 
> way for Smalltalk to go. Especially David's work on modularization,
> namespaces, mixins and language integration. Download it and take a closer
> look: www.smallscript.net

That website says:
>The SmallScript System is a rich multi-paradigm dynamic and scripting
>language platform that includes, as one of its primary languages, a
> superset/dialect of classic Smalltalk-98, which is simply referred to as
>the "SmallScript" language. (See Informal Language Comparison Chart). 

>The SmallScript language implementation is a complete redesign of the
>Smalltalk language, offering transparent cross-language integration and
>component based deployment

Note the expression: "superset/dialect of classic-Smalltalk-98".
Strange, isn't it?

If I want to do cross-language integration and still write Smalltalk
code I probably try SmallScript (or perhaps even better VB.net -
I don't now yet if they are now using a better garbage collector).

But I think Squeak faces a different challenge. And before adding to many
additional concepts / syntax features (which is in some way easy for a
bright mind) it is not necessarily something we should do.

I'd say we should definitly go for Henrik's solutions first. 
It will be a challenge to put that really in place and to weed out
bugs and we need at least a year experiencing the up und down sides 
of that solution. In an open source project this time is available:
that's the nice thing. 

And other concepts like the PIE things in another thread are really
exciting!!! But again I actually think we should go first through Henrik's
module implementation and integrate Anthony's block closure which will
surely take some additional months. In fact instead of doing requirements
engineering which is quite nice thing - implementation (the real hard
work - an area where we have some excellent people on this list) should
be in focus at this time.

I was asking a lot of questions in the past weeks not because I wanted to
criticize Henri works - in fact I appreciate it - but because I would
like to _understand_ it. 
And that's the nice thing. That's possible in Squeak!

I like the idea of Squeak beeing a research vehicle as well.

The thrust of SmallScript is somewhat different: The goal it to come 
up with a .NET compatible version of Smalltalk - a valuable endeavour
surely - but not necessarily something that should impose constraints on 
the further development of Squeak.
 
> The Syntactic-sugar may be a little bit confusing first - but 
> after a while you will notice that it is pure Smalltalk. 

Isn't it the other way round: SmallScript is some kind of syntactic sugar
above *one* general CLR-based MS language  ;-) ? (Don't take this sentence
too seriously and start a thread on .NET please - there will be enough
occasions to do this in other places - ahem - I'm probably contradicting
myself heavily.)

The approch MS is taking with the .NET initiative is interesting and
has it's own merits.
But that does not necessarily mean that everybody should do the same. In
fact the thing I like about Squeak is that the people behind it dare
to do other things and have sometimes refreshing new thoughts challenging 
"well established" software engineering rules (like for example to come up
with the class Morph which has 1000 methods).

To do research means to be able to work with not so polished
things and that has it's own merits and is unavoidable if one 
really want's to aim at something new. 
Thas is the DynaBook as far as I understand. It's still an exciting
idea and I like that Alan and Dan (and others) are further
persuing it. It's the work of their life. (well maybe that's a pathetic)

"The computer revolution hasn't happend yet" - inspite of 
marketing hubba hubba, where the revolution
takes place in every issues of every journal with a nicely 
colored front page.)

 > Squeak can profit a lot from Davids work.
What do you mean specifically?
Do you use SmallScript heavily? Or have you just mastered the first steps?


Cheers
Hannes Hirzel