On 21 févr. 07, at 09:24, Todd Blanchard wrote:
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.
Sounds really interesting for small devices. Thanks for the pointer.
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