Hi Ken!
Mmmm? All this "revolutionary" and "radical" stuff sounds interesting.
When talking to my Aboriginal friend about it he just smiles and continues
painting. He mutters something which sounds like "..and this too shall
pass". He says it all the time?

I wish I could get to read some of those old papers I might gain insight and
acceptance to the Smalltalk8o "old boys" network and learn a lot more to
boot.
I guess this is the way it done: earn a reputation, slowly, slowly.

For what it is worth: in the late eighties this "revolutionary" thought,
grabbed me too.
I enrolled in a  course in 5gl languages, binary relationship and semantic
modeling ( Dr Debenham and Montgomery), University of Technology Sydney,
thinking this might be just what the doctor ordered.
It was a great three weeks. Prolog impressed me. Sounded a lot like those
Concurrent Constraint Programming Languages you mention Ken. Please tell me
more!
I was less impressed with Smalltalk than with Prolog, feeling that Smalltak
was too much like a "very clever" procedural language.
I rated Smalltalk as being closer to a 4.5gl, than 5gl: great for treatment
of information and data. Knowledge? No.
The Prolog (I think you are refering to) seemed short on physical strength:
gigantic head, spindly body, no arms and legs. Smalltalk, like Arno with a
pin head.
I hope my silly analogy hasn't upset anyone.
I'll learn reverence as I go along I suppose: when I learn the order of
importance.
We down under are known for our lack of reverence.
An english guy once told me why aussies never tip the cap as a sign of
respect.
It's because it is too difficult to do while the arms are shackled to the
waist.
Or we wear thongs all the time because we haven't been taught how to tie
shoe laces.

Here is a serious straight faced question. Set the alarm it will take some
time getting to it.

Ever since the Japanese Industry in 1982 chose Prolog (not Lisp) as the
prefered Language to take them into the nineties and beyond (still on the
launch pad), it has been left to the europeans particularly the Spanish (and
I thought that all they did was torment cattle) to develop Prolog.
It still doesn't fit the Arno model yet, but with the introduction of OO
into Prolog is quickly catching up.
Now in the early eighties, a Mike Teng Prolog (long before I had even heard
of it) turned up in Digitalk Smalltalk/V and V286 ( I have a copy and love
it).
About the time of the Digitalk demise and V286's adoption by ParcPlace,
Prolog was carefully removed and discarded.
Smalltalk/V286 became Smalltalk Express(for windows), another victim of dll
attack.
Whilst looking through the Squeak Swiki a few years ago: 2.7 squeaks (Squeak
time).
I discovered Prolog. What a surprise! K. Bolot had done the port to Squeak.
There was one other entry called Picoverse. I was very impressed with his
insight. I think he has subsequently gone mad and hung himself.
I prefer taking the P..s out of  "important " people, to hanging myself.
Any way another visit to the Swiki and yes the dust is getting thicker on
Squeak Prolog.
Of course Prolog will not guarantee Squeak an intelligence for that is
impossible. No language will achieve that.  To achieve success with AI one
has to know what I is in the first place.
If Squeak ever gets a brain, the big question is, will it be dead.

Ah! to the question!:
Does anyone have an answer to any thing above?
Just a squeak will do.
Yours
Cheerfully
Justin


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Kahn" <kenkahn at toontalk.com>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 13, 2001 1:20 PM
Subject: Re:Message passing rather than object orientation


> Alan Kay wrote:
> >       I think after Carl heard about Smalltalk in Nov 72, and saw some
> > of the examples, he was able to come up with some valuable
> > characterizations of control structures and objects. Unfortunately
> > for posterity, neither the PARC group or the MIT group really was
> > able to implement a practical enough version of the deeper scope of
> > these ideas. (Part of the problem is that something like
> > zero-overhead, large number of processes are needed to really do the
> > job.) Recently Andreas Raab has done some remarkable experiments with
> > very large numbers of very low overhead processes in Squeak which
> > bodes well for the future.
> >
>
> I should learn more about what Andreas has done (and Squeakers should look
> at how Mozart/Oz has done something similar - visit www.mozart-oz.org ).
> Concurrent logic programming languages never had a problem getting zero
> overhead processes since it is easy to make a process feather weight in a
> language in which there is no primitive way of expressing sequential
> computation. There is no stack or calling context. (When you need
> sequentiality you need to program it yourself as a kind of data flow
> dependency. This can be a bit awkward but it is rare enough and keeps the
> underly model and engine nice and simple.) Even in the 1980s we (and the
> Japanese 5th Generation Project) had programs with tens or hundreds of
> thousands of processes running perfectly well.
>
> > Ken, what are your current thoughts about what should be done (now 12
> > years after the ECOOP paper)?
> >
>
> I have two completely different answers depending upon whether one is a
> revolutionary or not.
>
> 1. Revolutionary answer. Don't let the past hinder you. As you used to say
> "burn the disk packs". I would continue to explore the family of languages
> Vijay Saraswat called Concurrent Constraint Programming in his CMU thesis
> (1989). I would try to combine the best of ToonTalk ( www.toontalk.com )
> with these more textual languages. I think great things can be made and
> great things discovered. But I still don't have a good answer to the
> question that Mark Weiser asked me 12 years ago - "how can the world get
> from where it is to where I see it should go?"  Maybe ToonTalk is an
answer
> if we just wait 20 years for these kids to grow up.
>
> 2. Evolutionary answer. Start from where most programmers are today (maybe
> C++ or Java) and give them small enough steps forward that the chance of
> success is great enough. Some of the things that should be part of an
ideal
> language can be provided in libraries. It can get pretty ugly but at least
> the ideas become widely diseminated.
>
> To me Squeak is revolutionary without being radical anymore. I think if
you
> are going to be revolutionary you may as well also explore radically
> different models of computation.
>
> Best,
>
> -ken kahn ( www.toontalk.com )
>
>
>