pipe and system building

Fabio Filasieno fabio.filasieno at gmail.com
Wed Aug 29 09:41:01 UTC 2007


On Aug 28, 2007, at 11:35 PM, David Mitchell wrote:

> I'm curious,
>
> would Bert's asPipe work for you.
>
> It basically lets you treat cascades as pipes.
>
> Or does it need a syntax change?

Bert's as Pipe in not enough for me .... (even if I think if a  
beautiful hack).

The practical reason is that you don't want to see an exclamation  
mark "!" become a question mark "?" just because there was the  
asQuestion keyword before.

But my main reason for the pipe is that I want a culture change.

I'd like a more functional Smalltalk.

It's a culture change that I want.

Now. Considering that I'm new in here I do not pretend change happens  
today.
I like what I see in squeak: the environment it's a like `a back to  
the future`. It's incredible that the industry has not yet learned  
the lesson. It's almost 40 years !

But .. there are gray areas.

 From a first look at the collection libraries, it seems to me that  
there is a LOT of bloat. Really really a LOT.
I bet that Ocaml's collections can do the same things with an order  
of magnitude of less of code.

This is bad.

Other minor critics I would do is that while the environment is close  
to perfection, it somehow feels like you are in you own magic  
wonderland separated from the rest of the world.

I've tried to clearly expose all the arguments of why the pipe could  
become the cornerstone of functional compositions in smalltalk AND  
the beginning of a new even more powerful Smalltalk... and by the way  
the counter arguments were a bit mild or close to non-existent.

Now I'm looking at the Morphic tutorials :-) ... I feel like child  
playing with toys

Let me go play now !
Oh, how much fun ! Oh, a child's life ...

Fabio


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