Nail Soup

John Maxwell jmax at sfu.ca
Mon May 10 21:59:59 UTC 2004


Dave wrote:

> That would be me; this is way over my head.  Somebody please explain
> what Squat is all about and why it is Extremely Clever.  Thanks.

Let me have a crack at this, because I'm new to this, but I think I get 
it.

If the original "Objects" idea was to divide the computer into zillions 
of tiny computers, "each simulating a useful structure," then this 
means that those 'zillions of tiny computers' don't even need to be in 
the same box - they can be truly distributed. This concept has been at 
least latent in Smalltalk (and the Internet, for that matter, as I 
suppose Java and .NET are instantiations of this notion) from the 
beginning. Squat makes it work in a very tiny package, leverages the 
ubiquitous web as an on-ramp and then sets up a messaging system for 
Squats to talk to one another.

Please correct me if I'm misrepresenting this :-)


  - John Maxwell
    jmax at sfu.ca




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