[squeak-dev] Re: What is Squeak? What is Smalltalk? (why is the
list munging subject headers with "[squeak-dev]"?)
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
woods at planix.ca
Sun Dec 7 23:25:43 UTC 2008
On 7-Dec-2008, at 5:16 PM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>
> Traits are actually quite cool.
Traits may be cool, and/or they may just be a fad like I think Aspect
Oriented Programming is.
However from what I can tell so far Traits are not really Smalltalk-80
at all.
I Squeak still supposed to be Smalltalk-80? Is it supposed to be
Smalltalk + Traits? Is it supposed to be a standards-compatible
Smalltalk? What is Squeak? Who definitively can answer that these
days?
> I think people do not hate Traits but just object to the way they
> were added to the system.
From what I know at this moment I personally think trying to include
Traits in the core basic image, and especially any attempt to make use
of them in the basic core image, is fine just so long as you call the
result something other than Smalltalk-80.
I do not yet know how Traits have been introduced into Smalltalk, but
it is my very strong impression that the result is not compatible with
strict Smalltalk-80.
At this point I (naively) think Smalltalk with Traits _must_ be a fork
and it _must_ be called something else. I may be very wrong, and I
may be starting from the wrong impressions, but that's where my
understanding takes me to right now.
So, in that sense, I think I would object to the fact they were added
to the system, not just the way they were added to the system.
I personally would really like Squeak to be a strong, viable,
Smalltalk-80 implementation with full standards compatibility and with
a good strong community which provides add-ons, extensions, and such
as additional packages. Perhaps for a poor analogy, Squeak should be
the equivalent of the Linux kernel in GNU/Linux systems, thus allowing
for variant distributions which might ship ready-to-run images which
contain specific sets of pre-loaded packages and modifications, but
which hopefully all derive from the same core image and VM. A
slightly better analogy might be the full NetBSD (or FreeBSD) core
OS. It's a full base operating system (not just a kernel), but there
are thousands of additional add-on packages available to any user.
Even X11 is often considered to be just an add-on package.
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<woods at planix.ca>
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