On 9/13/07, Peter William Lount <peter at smalltalk.org> wrote:
>
> > (Besides, that message was posted off-list for a reason.  Now that
> > it's made public, I'll try to sum up my arguments in a single message.)
> I thought it relevant to clarify the explanation. I also don't take
> false accusations and ad hominem attacks lightly. They need to be seen
> in the full light of day as an attempt to stifle discussion and
> communication.

How is publishing a private email someone sends you without warning as
use for an attack not a means of damaging their credibility in the
conversation (and therefor stifling them)?

> With chips like the Tile64 in the
> pipe slated for delivery later this year the reality is that N-core
> chips where N is very large are on the immediate horizon. They plan to
> take N to over 1,000 with their current design approach within a few
> years, starting with 36 and 120 next year. One very interesting aspect
> of the Tile Processor design is that each core is networked with the
> others in what they call an iMesh, basically a flexible and fast network
> connections some of which are dedicated between cores. They claim
> impressive results with their design in that it costs less to transmit a
> message between two cores than it takes to store to memory. This changes
> everything in how we understand multi-core processing.

This is quite interesting indeed.  I just can't see the cache dancing
Intel is doing being able to scale much further.

> [
>      Object subclass: #Person.
>
"<snip>"
> ] fileInWithinTransaction.

If we came up with a nice replacement for chunk format that would
probably be a good thing, though Craig may solve it another way.

> I didn't see any need to express that in
> the particular posting as it's a topic of it's own and the focus of this
> thread was to show an example of moving Smalltalk towards a PERL style
> of solution with syntax gone wild verses a solution of moving Smalltalk
> forward without adding any new syntax at all!

I agree that it's very important to limit new syntax for the language.
 C++ failed to do this and has fallen out of favor, Java has started
down this dead end of ever increasing complexity and as you point out
Perl was pretty much always unnecessarily complex.

> > was too close to being gratuitous trolling.
> You have a strange view of the world where you think you can falsely
> accuse people with just what you perceive rather than asking deeper
> questions to probe their intentions.

Well, I personally try to ask the person before going off the handle
(though not always ;), but if the person truly is trolling then they
will lie so the questions don't help at all.

> The defensive attitude is strictly in response to an unwarranted person
> offensive attack by yourself. Regardless of the group I'm in I always
> address ad hominem attacks by clearly stating what the attacker said
> that was a personal attack and by asking them to cease such silliness.

You must be no fun at parties then. ;)  In some theoretical vacuum
every idea must stand on it's own merits whether it came from Einstein
or the world's dumbest person.  But from a practicality stand point
this just wastes too much time.  And saying someone is using ad
hominem attacks is casting a negative light on that person, weakening
their positions in the discussion and is therefor ad hominem itself',
even if true.

Of course you can say it's ok if they truly were using an ad hominem
attack, but according to logic all ideas must stand on their own
merits, no?  So even someone with bad behavior shouldn't be thrown in
a negative light so that he isn't taken seriously. ;)

> Smalltalk, the language syntax, must be made very carefully least we end
> up with a mangled language like Perl where one must be a master of
> syntax memorization and gymnastics.

Yes, this is quite important to keep in mind imo.  Contrary to what
Mr. Schwartz said earlier in the thread, when the language is complex
it complicates everything built on top of it.  If the language is
simple then only the complicated problems are complicated, and even
then the solution is sometimes simple (as it should be).

I am reliving this reality once again with a "perl to python"
conversion at work.  Despite python's warts, every single program I
have converted so far has been much shorter and at the same time more
clear.

Also note that his statement that "having to learn tons of libraries
before being able to do anything" is not valid either.  Think about
"hello world", the first program you learn in most languages.  In C,
C++, C#, Java, Smalltalk, Lisp, etc., this is done with a library,
while in the scripting languages it's usually built in, but what's the
impact of this?  Nothing, the beginner doesn't care if print is built
in or not, it's no harder to use in either case.  But if it's in a
library he can enhance it later.

> Oh great, the wonderful world of types. Sigh. Yes, I know that they are
> needed for interfacing to other systems. Types, sigh.

Don't be so down on types just because of languages with broken type
systems. :)  Though I do find programming in a late bound, interactive
system like Smalltalk much much faster.  A language with a really good
type system like Haskell forces a lot of thinking and designing up
front before you actually write code.  In Smalltalk it's more like
clay. :)