Smalltalk mysticism

Marcel Weiher marcel at metaobject.com
Thu Jul 13 08:53:02 UTC 2000


> From: Aaron Reichow <reic0024 at d.umn.edu>

> The Smalltalk system seems to share some cosmological, religio-
> philosophical with the rest of the universe.

This is because it is defined completely in terms of itself,  
although of course there are places where it cheats.  Many other  
languages are 'built', even conceptually, on concrete things (at  
least in machine-terms) like integers, floats, memory locations.   
Smalltalk is conceptually rooted in the abstraction of Object, which  
(again) is mutually recursively defined, thus making it a closed  
world, a self-contained universe so to speak.

A self-contained closed universe is a pretty mystical place, at  
least for us humans.

Marcel





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