hi

since dave thomas at esug talked about sapphire a scripting smalltalk 
language, we are dreaming about it. Alex has a 0.1 version and we are 
planning to work on it soon and have a first release.

Now I would like to know what you were looking exactly? I can 
understand for example that the
file library of python are better than the ones of squeak. But this is 
at another level more at the library level than the language.

Stef

On 27 mars 04, at 16:11, Duane Maxwell wrote:

> On Mar 27, 2004, at 4:14 AM, Lothar Schenk wrote:
>> I doubt if one can get substantial advances in programmer 
>> productivity by
>> focussing on the use of whitespace or letter case in language syntax.
>
> I've been doing a substantial amount of contract programming in Python 
> for my paying work, and while I was initially very skeptical about the 
> whitespace/indention block scoping thing, I was surprised to find it 
> did, in fact, increase my productivity, particularly if the tools make 
> it easy to control it.  Python is such a simple language that I can 
> blast out tons of good code in a short period of time, mainly because 
> I give very little mindshare to syntax over semantics.
>
> I've also had to do a lot of very complicated Flash work in the last 
> couple of years, and made major use of the prototyping strengths of 
> Actionscript/Javascript/ECMAScript.  Once you take it out of the 
> context of the browser, ECMAScript is actually a very nice little 
> language.  It will be interesting to see what happens with KDE 3.2 
> which now supports a complete binding for ECMAScript.
>
> I can see where these guys are trying to go with this new language, 
> and they might get some traction if they can indeed utilize existing 
> Python modules, but as we all know, the quality of a language is no 
> indicator of broad acceptance.
>
> Of course, I'd prefer Smalltalk over all of these, but I unfortunately 
> it has not been the solution for the particular problems I've been 
> asked to solve.
>
> -- Duane
>
>