On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 05:00 AM, Lex Spoon wrote:

Robert Withers rwithers12@attbi.com wrote:

...

How would it be different? Where would it hurt? I can imagine that it would be a beautiful engine, asynchronously sending messages and making sure things synchronize later. Events from the external system would just be another message send into the image. You wouldn't need an idle loop. You could schedule the message sends based on cost feedback. I don't have as good a feel for what SafeSqueak would feel like, though.

Well, it wouldn't take a community commitment, of course, but it would require some core group of enthusiasts. I think they are out there. :-)

SafeSqueak would also demonstrate to the Smalltalk community that such a wonderful way to do in-language security is available. Honestly, one reason I got into this is that it drives me crazy whenever someone says "we need security, so lets add passwords" or "we need security, so lets start using cryptographic signatures". If I start telling them about capabilities, they currently just say "that's only theore. It's spinning my head, and I already understand and can use these other methods, anyway. Security = passwords. nya nya nya i can't here you".

A perfect application of revoking the audible capability to the poor little non-squeaklet. Feed the annoyance some bytecodes and perhaps he'll pipe down. Java, JMS, J2EE, JTS, XML, XTS, XSL, SOAP, RMI, CLR, ML, Ocaml... whatever. If there's no market for secure Smalltalk, so we just have to create our own.

Yarg!!

yeah, Lex. Let it be known.

If we start saying "Well, SafeSmalltalk does it this way", and even better "SafeSmalltalk automatically prevents the security hole you just got in your Java program", then these discussions will go a lot more nicely.

such perfect restrained sarcasm and disdain for the opponent. I love it! :)

Further, the world will start getting populated with more secure software. The most aggravating part of the computing industry is that people keep doing stupid things out of ignorance. There's little respect far what has been studied already. One of the chief designers actually stood up at OOPSLA in front of 1000+ people a few years ago and said he didn't see much point to having closures in his language.

Which nincompoop was that? Squeakers are the smartest group of people I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Come join the new list and let's see what ferments, or rather foments.

Thanks for your fantastic posts these past few days. I have really enjoyed reading them.

cheers, rob

ps. Let's transition the discussion to squeak-e. We should leave the other 900 squeakers alone, at this point ;-)