Text to speech complaint and Hello everyone

Peter van Rooijen peter at vanrooijen.com
Sat Aug 28 22:44:45 UTC 2004


Joshua Scholar wrote:

 > It looks to me like everyone copied bits of message passing
 > and then copied some OO concepts and missed the importance of having:
> 1. an interactive language 
> 2. a built in database describing the system 
> 3. a typeless language to make rapid and flexible prototyping possible

Joshua,

I'm glad you like Squeak/Smalltalk.

What you said that "it looks like" may indeed look like that, but e.g. 
with Java I don't think it is actually the case. In fact, I would say 
that the language designers left out on purpose many of the things that 
make Smalltalk great in the eyes of Smalltalkers.

IOW, it's not because they missed the importance of those things, but 
they recognized the way in which these things make Smalltalk 
inaccessible to so many programmers. My feeling is that they wanted not 
the nicest possible language for programming, but a programming language 
that would be very widely used. So they left out all the complications 
that make Smalltalk difficult to understand and use for the "masses".

As time passes, more and more of the Smalltalk niceties will find their 
way into more mainstream languages. The same might be said of the 
niceties of Eiffel, such as design by contract, command-query separation 
and short form.

Don't assume that the mainstream language designers don't know or don't 
understand what makes Smalltalk great. Rather, believe that the issue is 
that they don't *want* to build a Smalltalk(-like) system under a 
different name.

At the same time, if you're going to be a Smalltalker, expect that many 
of your programmer-colleagues will not understand what the big deal is.

Cheers,

Peter

> Joshua Scholar



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list