On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:25:34 +0530, "K. K. Subramaniam" subbukk@gmail.com wrote:
Concepts in Squeak have their origins in biology rather than in computational math. The boundary between 'hardware' and 'software' is blurry. See the reading list at http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp particularly "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.
Richard O'Keefe refutes this claim in his post [1] "Re: Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago," dated "2009-07-16 01:38:14 GMT," on the Haskell-Cafe mailing list (see http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61329); _viz._:
Concepts in Squeak [a dialect and implementation of Smalltalk] have
their origins
in biology rather than in computational math....
That posting is wrong.
Smalltalk's roots are very firmly planted in Lisp, with perhaps a touch of Logo (which also had its roots in Lisp). The classic Smalltalk-76 paper even contains a meta-circular interpreter, which I found reminiscent of the old Lisp one. The "biological" metaphor in Smalltalk is actually a SOCIAL metaphor: sending and receiving messages, and a "social" model of agents with memory exchanging messages naturally leads to anthropomorphisms.
The other classic OO language, which inspired C++, which inspired Java, which inspired C#, is Simula 67, which has its roots in Algol 60. While Simula 67 was sometimes used for simulating biological processes, the main background was discrete event systems like factories and shops; there are no biological metaphors in Simula.
-- Benjamin L. Russell
[1] O'Keefe, Richard. "Re: Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 16 July 2009. 24 July 2009. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61329.