pipe

Marcel Weiher marcel at metaobject.com
Wed Aug 29 23:50:52 UTC 2007


On Aug 26, 2007, at 3:10 AM, Fabio Filasieno wrote:

>> Smalltalk is very different - you always can add behaviour you
>> need to the other object and the application logic is distributed
>> across the system.
>
> That's not the point, but you are right, Unix and Smalltalk are  
> different.
> In regard to the black boxes thing.

I think a lot of the differences are superficial, but one seems very  
deep:  Unix's unifying principle is extensional, Smalltalk intensional.

That is, Unix gets its power from the fact that everything is just  
represented as bytes, and you can pipe those around.  Who cares what  
they mean?  To the refined tastes of us Smalltalkers that seems  
barbaric, but it is very powerful in a very pragmatic sort of way, and  
gets you extremely loose coupling and late binding (of things other  
than the fact that it's all just bytes).  Of course, you lose moving  
to higher levels of abstraction, and no, XML doesn't really do it.

Smalltalk, on the other hand, does really well with modelling  
semantics, as objects sending messages, but has a hard time extending  
its unifying principle outside the image.  Which is somewhat ironic  
considering the idea was connecting things and late, late binding.

Marcel




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