[squeak-dev] Re: [Pharo-dev] ||

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Sat Feb 7 15:18:40 UTC 2015


On Thu, Feb 05, 2015 at 01:54:51PM +0100, Marcus Denker wrote:
> 
> > On 05 Feb 2015, at 10:12, Marcus Denker <marcus.denker at inria.fr> wrote:
> >> 
> >> On 05 Feb 2015, at 10:04, Marcus Denker <marcus.denker at inria.fr> wrote:
> > 
> > Another way to see it: How would the original Smalltalk be designed if they would have had 4GB RAM in 1978?
> > 
> > What fascinates me still is that Smalltalk used the existing resources (even building their own machines) to an
> > extreme, while today we are obsessed to find reasons why we can not do anything that makes the system 
> > slower or use more memory than yesterday. And that even with resources growing every year???
> > 
> > This is why we e.g. now have a meta object describing every instance variable in Pharo. I am sure there are people
> > who will see these ~7000 objects as pure waste??? while I would say that we have already *now* the resources to be
> > even more radical.
> > 
> 
> Seemingly I still can not explain what I mean in away that people get it, so please just ignore this mail.
> 
> 	Marcus
> 

Your point makes good sense to me. In 1978, a system in which a low-level
integer was represented as an object with behavior would have been perceived
as a rediculously wasteful idea. And can you imagine someone seriously
suggesting something so wasteful as automatic memory management?

So if the "same" system was being designed today, it might very well include
new concepts that today are perceived as wasteful. Some of those concepts
might turn out to be very good thing once we get used to them.

Dave



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