On Feb 20, 2007, at 11:57 PM, Alan Lovejoy wrote:

> Your comment made me think of the difference in attitude between  
> French
> speakers and English Speakers.

I don't find this analogy particularly compelling.  I don't think  
people are really trying to keep Smalltalk 'pure'.  I think they're  
trying to find ways to improve it.  Lots of things have been tried -  
multiple inheritance, prototype based vs class based models, access  
control wrappers, etc...  The cool thing is you can make it what you  
want already.  The trick is getting your nifty thing adopted into the  
standard package.

> Other programming languages have been stealing from Smalltalk for  
> decades.
> It's time we returned the favor.

I'm in favor of that - but honestly, there hasn't been a lot worth  
stealing from the mainstream.

I have been looking at erlang recently and find some of the parallel/ 
process/queue constructs interesting and would love to try to bring  
some of that over and try building a high performance web server  
based on those patterns.

And then, of course, there are interesting technologies that have  
nothing to do with the language but would make a great addition to  
the platform.  Like Supple http://www.cs.washington.edu/ai/supple/ -  
a really nifty demo I saw last year.

So there is lots of great stuff to steal - but not much of it from  
the mainstream languages - they mostly seem to ape the last  
generation and then take a little lunge in the direction of Smalltalk.

-Todd Blanchard