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Many of those "overgrown scripting languages" owe a pretty big debt to Smalltalk. Ruby and JS, particularly, borrow heavily from Smalltalk and Self. Lua is very
by qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Many of those "overgrown scripting languages" owe a pretty big debt to Smalltalk. Ruby and JS, particularly, borrow heavily from Smalltalk and Self. Lua is very Schemey, and while many talk about JS's Scheme influences, Lua really does feel like Scheme sometimes, and reflects Scheme's values far more than JS (small number of primitives, TCO, emphasis on minimalism and flexability, etc.).
Yes, they don't have the refactoring toolkit Smalltalk does, and they can be slow, but don't discount them off the bat. The two ends of the scale are closer together than you think.
- douche 10y agoSure, but to be kind, the tooling mostly sucks bogwater. Trying to detect usages of symbols or perform simple refactorings is considerably harder than even in languages with less than stellar static typing, like the C++/Java/C# enterprise workhorses, much less anything more powerful. Maybe I'm spoiled, but using find&replace and runtime errors feels as primitive as banging two rocks together.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWell, maybe I'm spoiled, but waiting forever for your code to recompile, just to discover that you misplaced a semicolon, as opposed to running it through a REPL as you develop feels a primitive as banging rocks together. It's a tradeoff, and I didn't choose the refactoring side. Although refactoring did originate in Smalltalk...