election details *PLEASE READ*

J J azreal1977 at hotmail.com
Thu Feb 22 21:25:02 UTC 2007


>From: Roel Wuyts <Roel.Wuyts at ulb.ac.be>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Re: election details *PLEASE READ*
>Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 22:52:45 +0100
>
>I drink do that. Cheers Andreas.
>
>It's fun that especially a very open and reflective language like  
>Smalltalk actually is not extended very much (or only within small  
>research projects not taken up by the community). Where are the macro  
>systems ? Variable length argument lists ? Nifty versioning and  packaging 
>systems ? Monads ? Usable typing systems ? etc. etc.

But before we decide a feature is missing from Squeak because someone else 
has it, we must first think *why* some other place has it.  For an extreme 
example, C has pointers and Squeak doesn't.  Does anyone think Squeak needs 
pointers?

Likewise, Haskell has Monads.  But that is because there is no other 
language supported way to represent state change.  It is a very nice 
language, but for Monads to work right, I think you kind of need the whole 
thing (i.e. partial application, type checking, the things that make Haskell 
Haskell).

So far, any time I would have reached for variable length argument lists in 
other languages, I used meta-programming in Smalltalk.  And Macro systems?  
It can be put in easily, and I have code that generates code, but due to the 
nature of Smalltalk, we can add language constructs without having to resort 
to macros as Lisp does.

Having said all that, I think Squeak could use more formal Lazy evaluation 
support, and I published some classes for it.  And the package system is a 
known open issue.  I personally believe change sets could be made more 
advanced to help out in a lot of areas (for one, to help with documenting 
that elusive "why").

I think we should try to take things from other languages that make sense 
for smalltalk, but I don't think there will be a time when one language 
(even smalltalk!) will be perfect for every task.  We will still need at 
least Haskell. :)

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