On Sep 19, 2006, at 5:19 PM, Ramon Leon wrote:

>
>> You know, replace "Smalltalk" with "Lisp" and you'll sound
>> just like Paul Graham :)
>
> :), no surprise, Lisp was one of Smalltalk inspirations.  The two  
> languages
> are very similar in many respects, I have much respect for Lisp, but I
> prefer Smalltalk.
>
>

Smalltalk is a more consistent environment whereas Lisp is a more  
consistent language:
Experiments like evolutionary programming done by Hillis crossing  
over lisp trees with a restricted vocabulary would be quite hard to  
do in Smalltalk.
Yet I prefer my tweakable browsers over a tweakable emacs...

Btw., Paul's example for the conciseness of Lisp vs other languages  
(including Smalltalk) is a but spoiled:
==========
As an illustration of what I mean about the relative power of  
programming languages, consider the following problem. We want to  
write a function that generates accumulators-- a function that takes  
a number n, and returns a function that takes another number i and  
returns n incremented by i.

(That's incremented by, not plus. An accumulator has to accumulate.)

In Common Lisp this would be
(defun foo (n)
   (lambda (i) (incf n i)))

(...)

foo: n
   |s|
   s := n.
   ^[:i| s := s+i. ]
because although in general lexical variables work, you can't do an  
assignment to a parameter, so you have to create a new variable s.
=========

What we _can_ do, is to define foo within the context of Number:

Number >> foo
	^[:i | self + i]

Shorter, isn't it? ;-)

Cheers,

Markus