eXene

Jimmie Houchin jhouchin@REDACTED
Mon Mar 24 17:44:19 CET 2003


Anybody who is interested in looking at what Alan Kay and Smalltalk are 
doing try out Squeak.

http://www.squeak.org

There are several parallels between Squeak and Erlang. Each have their 
pros and cons. Squeak is a much better understanding of true OO than you 
will have found other places. That said, Squeak is looking for better 
ways to implement solutions. OO is one way, however the Squeak community 
is very open minded to other ways of expressing solutions. They are open 
to learning what other language communities have learned.

While Squeak may not ever become a 'Functional' language you may find it 
interesting. There was a recent discussion on modeling things in a more 
'declarative' manner. So with Squeak (not necessarily other Smalltalks) 
there is an openness for better solutions.

Interestingly enough in regarding this thread, Squeak already does it's 
own GUI. It does not use native widgets. Squeak is very cross-platform 
to about 30-40 (I think) platforms currently.

It is open source and ready to play.

An OS is being written in Squeak called OpenCroquet.
http://www.opencroquet.org

Squeak currently isn't as proficient for massive parallel/concurrent 
applications as Erlang. But there is a desire to get there.

Squeak is very much a living environment. It is very malleable and able 
to be changed while being used. Like the 'Hot Code Replacement' thread 
in comp.lang.functional. It's meant to staying running indefinitely.

Not trying to hijack the Erlang list here. Just wanted to inform those 
who may be interested.

Thanks,

Jimmie Houchin

Jay Nelson wrote:

 > C. Reinke wrote:
 >
 >>      [for those who haven't come accross Petri nets, see:
 >>       http://www.daimi.au.dk/PetriNets/ ]
 >
 >
 >
 > I had forgotten about these.  Will read up to jog my memory.
 >
 >
 >> Sounds pretty general-purpose (and concurrent) to me.
 >
 >
 >
 > I like the sounds of the concurrent processes interpretation.
 > OO seems so different than what he described.  I never did
 > any SmallTalk, but read the SmallTalk 80 book to learn about
 > design.  I liked it at the time, but the class hierarchy was so
 > big it seemed difficult to become proficient.  I really wanted to
 > code it after reading the book, though.
 >
 >
 >>   "I made up the term 'object-oriented', and I can tell you I didn't
 >>    have C++ in mind" - Alan Kay, OOPSLA '97
 >
 >
 >
 > Bingo.  That is very funny!
 >
 >> Another way I like to phrase it: users are not dummies, they are
 >> domain experts (though their domain is usually not computers or
 >> software); they don't want computer experts to give them lots of
 >> words (applications), they need a tailor-made language in which they
 >> can express their domain knowledge to tackle their daily problems.
 >
 >
 >
 > I like this.  I had overlooked the fact that the users are domain
 > experts.  That is a good concept to keep in mind.
 >
 > jay





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