Naive number questions

goran.krampe at bluefish.se goran.krampe at bluefish.se
Thu Nov 4 06:14:29 UTC 2004


Hi Rob!

First: Could you turn off HTML postings? :) Thanks.

Rob Lally <smalltalk at roblally.plus.com> wrote:
> Smalltalkers have been in the vanguard of almost
> everything good in software over the past two decades, use that and
> build on it. Don't do it by trying to bash the opposition, you're
> better than that.
>
> Here endeth the rant.
>
> Sorry about that, it all just sort of ... welled up in me.

No problem, it is just that... we all know this. :) We just are soooo
tired, at least I am. ;)

But I have an advice for people that, like me, often get sucked into
advocacy discussions:

There is NO point in arguing with a person who has lived in the dark for
their whole life that it is so much nicer out in the sun. Because he/she
has never seen the sun and can't imagine that it could be any better
than the good old dark.

Well, couldn't come up with a better analogy :), but I have come to the
conclusion that it is utterly FRUITLESS to argue for Smalltalk to
someone who has only experienced statically typed languages for example.
They just don't get it. You need to experience a dynamic language before
the coin drops.

regards, Göran

PS. I ported pystone to Squeak recently, it is a... silly benchmark that
does weird silly things, but it was fun comparing it to Python. On SM
called sqystone. Btw, the tests you have done - have you used all
available gcc optimizations for the Squeak VM? I have discovered that
performance of the VM can be increased quite a bit with the right
selection of opts. I will test myself later today to see my numbers.



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