Text to speech complaint and Hello everyone
Peter van Rooijen
peter at vanrooijen.com
Sat Aug 28 22:44:45 UTC 2004
Joshua Scholar wrote:
> It looks to me like everyone copied bits of message passing
> and then copied some OO concepts and missed the importance of having:
> 1. an interactive language
> 2. a built in database describing the system
> 3. a typeless language to make rapid and flexible prototyping possible
Joshua,
I'm glad you like Squeak/Smalltalk.
What you said that "it looks like" may indeed look like that, but e.g.
with Java I don't think it is actually the case. In fact, I would say
that the language designers left out on purpose many of the things that
make Smalltalk great in the eyes of Smalltalkers.
IOW, it's not because they missed the importance of those things, but
they recognized the way in which these things make Smalltalk
inaccessible to so many programmers. My feeling is that they wanted not
the nicest possible language for programming, but a programming language
that would be very widely used. So they left out all the complications
that make Smalltalk difficult to understand and use for the "masses".
As time passes, more and more of the Smalltalk niceties will find their
way into more mainstream languages. The same might be said of the
niceties of Eiffel, such as design by contract, command-query separation
and short form.
Don't assume that the mainstream language designers don't know or don't
understand what makes Smalltalk great. Rather, believe that the issue is
that they don't *want* to build a Smalltalk(-like) system under a
different name.
At the same time, if you're going to be a Smalltalker, expect that many
of your programmer-colleagues will not understand what the big deal is.
Cheers,
Peter
> Joshua Scholar
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