new Smalltalk programmer's thoughts

Laurence Rozier laurence.rozier at gmail.com
Sat May 6 12:14:27 UTC 2006


On 5/6/06, Wolfgang Helbig <helbig at lehre.ba-stuttgart.de> wrote:
>
>
> This in turn is the only technique I know of that saves you from "off by
> one"
> errors in particular and "bugs" in general.
>
> So the changes *are* important.


For you and those who share your POV. Others who have been coding in
Smalltalk for over 30 years apparently have a different POV since it is
quite possible to adapt Squeak to your POV and they haven't done so.
Personally in over 20 years of Smalltalk coding, I've rarely seen any "off
by one" errors. You don't have to move too far up the food chain away from
machine language for that to happen.

And hard to implement in Smalltalk.
>
> Or, viewed as biological species, Squeak and even Smalltalk-80 evolved to
> a
> level where they lost the flexibility to meet the "new" challenge of
> switching
> from the dark art of medieval metaphors to the scientific technique of
> logical
> reasoning.


Squeak is very much capable of adapting to the needs you describe above.
Whether or not the cost/benefit tradeoffs make sense only you can determine.
A lot of work can be eliminated if you don't care about any of the existing
tools. When Spoon arrives it will be much easier to do what would have to be
done by hand or by judicious Monticello scripting. Squeak is so flexible
that you could even have both solutions existing within the same image using
some type of isolated project or island approach. The nicest thing is that
you don't have to take anyone else's word for it as you've got all the
source code you need to nudge Squeak's evolution in whatever direction you
want. It might be good to be mindful that complex species don't evolve by
optimizing their chemical bonding, let alone the  underlying quantum
chemical processes. Nature it appears, agrees with Ralph - program at a high
level!

Cheers,

Laurence

By the way, at
>         http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/58.html
> I posted another "challenge". It is quite harmless. :-)
>
> Greetings,
> Wolfgang
>
> --
> Weniger, aber besser.
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20060506/ab4ac5cc/attachment.htm


More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list