4 ms·

As much as I like Lisp or Smalltalk, I cannot help but wonder if they are really great in the large. Smalltalk has a pattern called Double Dispatch that makes

As much as I like Lisp or Smalltalk, I cannot help but wonder if they are really great in the large. Smalltalk has a pattern called Double Dispatch that makes sense but seems to tightly couple the classes. I keep looking at, of all things, the VBX market in the 90's and wonder why we don't have those type of components with current languages. I think something based on agents that create loosely coupled systems where it easier to expand and replace parts would be a better place to look for a future programming language.

mercer 9y ago
Are you secretly promoting Elixir/Erlang, or am I misreading what you mean with 'agents' in this case?
- protomyth 9y ago
  Down that path, but I'm just not sure Erlang is enough. I might be a bit infected by the promise of Telescript[1] or a paper[2]. RPC over HTTP (in one or more of its forms) won over mobile code, but I think the concept of software agents actually has a bigger win in the building of complex systems that can be reasoned about in the small as well as the large. I also think that the ability to replace software agents in a large system would be easier than refactoring / replacing objects. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_langua... 2) http://robotics.stanford.edu/~shoham/www%20papers/AgentOrientedProgrammingAIJ.pdf http://robotics.stanford.edu/~shoham/www%20papers/AgentOrien... from http://robotics.stanford.edu/~shoham/ http://robotics.stanford.edu/~shoham/
  - mercer 9y ago
    I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you'd like to see beyond Erlang. I'm new to Elixir/Erlang, so very curious to see it in a broader perspective.
    - protomyth 9y ago
      I love Erlang and their attitude about keeping systems running. Plus, the syntax gets a bad rap when its just different. Sadly, the process and state models are different from what really interests me in agents.
      - mercer 9y ago
        Which part interests you about agents?
        protomyth 9y ago
        I'm having a hard time writing up a complete answer, and will probably someday write an actual article, but I think the key for me is loose coupling of functionality and mobile code being a very interesting way to scale up a server farm. The whole thought of combining agents and tuple spaces into a system seems a lot closer to true reuse in software than objects has been. I think an agent programming language, a good speech act based communication language instead of the typical API, decent data types, and tuple spaces would make for a heck of a nice programming environment. I've had a hobby project for a long time to bring those elements together but I am still in the learning phase.
shalabhc 9y ago
> I think something based on agents that create loosely coupled systems where it easier to expand and replace parts would be a better place to look for a future programming language. +1 A different question would be - what would a Smalltalk like system look like 'in the large'? (There was the Croquet project that was a live distributed environment so there has been some work done here already.) It seems the hallmark of Smalltalk was late binding so perhaps the core model can be extrapolated to a loosely coupled distributed system?
- protomyth 9y ago
  I've seen one large Smalltalk project, and it seems like it evolved into a tightly coupled group of classes. It looked really hard about reasoning about any changes since the dependencies were pretty high. I think if you went with clusters of VMs talking to each other you could probably do a pretty good job. I do wonder if the work at Yale on Linda[1] & Tuple Spaces[2][3] would have been more popular when it was introduced in Java[4] then people would have reasoned a bit differently on big systems. Going the CORBA[5] route always seemed to generate really problematic systems. The again, I really thought it would be cool to have people program in Occam[6] just to force some thinking about organization of programs. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_(coordination_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_(coordination_language) 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space 3) https://books.google.com/books/about/Mirror_Worlds.html?id=jh2U379fq18C https://books.google.com/books/about/Mirror_Worlds.html?id=j... 4) https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076849/core-java/jini-technology--out-of-the-box.html https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076849/core-java/jini-tec... 5) http://www.corba.org/ http://www.corba.org/ 6) https://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~cs366/occam.pdf https://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~cs366/occam.pdf [PDF]
  - shalabhc 9y ago
    Right - I think good ideas in Smalltalk are messaging (~actors) and the liveness. But the usual ST model is too 'flat' - all objects and classes live in the same space. This could be extended such that each object is a space in itself, with it's own inner objects - this model can then recursively scale up or down to multiple levels and also work for large systems. > work at Yale on Linda[1] & Tuple Spaces Ah, I see what you mean by loosely coupled. Yes, Linda is neat and if we think about objects/messaging with nested spaces, then each space can have its own form of messaging (could use tuple spaces, for instance). Also, I really like the cluster of VMs idea because you can then implement various kinds of cluster wide virtualizations on it (Croquet did this with Squeak VMs). I do think that cluster wide virtualization is the future of large programmable systems. We've built up some abstractions that work 'in the small' - we don't have to write assembly or do register allocation, but most 'languages' still limit you to think about what goes in within one Unix process, a very small part of the system. Whole system programming abstraction aren't really there yet.
nickpsecurity 9y ago
Look up Telescript or Obliq languages for interesting stuff that was agent-oriented.
- protomyth 9y ago
  I mentioned Telescript in my reply[1] to mercer[2]. Obliq is pretty cool (the implementation is really interesting), but not the type of agents I want. 1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408262 2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408159
mark_l_watson 9y ago
I wonder if there is a future for Pharo Smalltalk as a user interface and coding environment that uses backend services written in other languages. Last week I saw Python matplotlib bindings for Pharo and as I played with this, I thought of interfaces to TensorFlow, ML services at AWS, GCP, and Azure, etc. This idea probably does not make sense, but the idea hit me. EDIT: like a replacement for Jupyter, but more capable.
- protomyth 9y ago
  Technically, it should be possible to build a Pharo / Squeak environment in a dynamic language like Python or Ruby. I generally see it as more a cultural issue. Pharo (and Smalltalks in general) are very productive environments, but they live on the concept of live objects (Smalltalk in the form of an image-based development environment). Given the love of text editors and Unix-style file development, I doubt there would be a move in that direction.
- scroot 9y ago
  Amber [1] is a Smalltalk that you use to develop in a Web Browser, but which will compile for you to JS on the back end. [1] http://www.amber-lang.net/ http://www.amber-lang.net/

mercer 9y ago

Are you secretly promoting Elixir/Erlang, or am I misreading what you mean with 'agents' in this case?

protomyth 9y ago
Down that path, but I'm just not sure Erlang is enough. I might be a bit infected by the promise of Telescript[1] or a paper[2]. RPC over HTTP (in one or more of its forms) won over mobile code, but I think the concept of software agents actually has a bigger win in the building of complex systems that can be reasoned about in the small as well as the large. I also think that the ability to replace software agents in a large system would be easier than refactoring / replacing objects. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_langua... 2) http://robotics.stanford.edu/~shoham/www%20papers/AgentOrientedProgrammingAIJ.pdf http://robotics.stanford.edu/~shoham/www%20papers/AgentOrien... from http://robotics.stanford.edu/~shoham/ http://robotics.stanford.edu/~shoham/
- mercer 9y ago
  I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you'd like to see beyond Erlang. I'm new to Elixir/Erlang, so very curious to see it in a broader perspective.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    I love Erlang and their attitude about keeping systems running. Plus, the syntax gets a bad rap when its just different. Sadly, the process and state models are different from what really interests me in agents.
    - mercer 9y ago
      Which part interests you about agents?
      - protomyth 9y ago
        I'm having a hard time writing up a complete answer, and will probably someday write an actual article, but I think the key for me is loose coupling of functionality and mobile code being a very interesting way to scale up a server farm. The whole thought of combining agents and tuple spaces into a system seems a lot closer to true reuse in software than objects has been. I think an agent programming language, a good speech act based communication language instead of the typical API, decent data types, and tuple spaces would make for a heck of a nice programming environment. I've had a hobby project for a long time to bring those elements together but I am still in the learning phase.

shalabhc 9y ago

> I think something based on agents that create loosely coupled systems where it easier to expand and replace parts would be a better place to look for a future programming language. +1 A different question would be - what would a Smalltalk like system look like 'in the large'? (There was the Croquet project that was a live distributed environment so there has been some work done here already.) It seems the hallmark of Smalltalk was late binding so perhaps the core model can be extrapolated to a loosely coupled distributed system?

protomyth 9y ago
I've seen one large Smalltalk project, and it seems like it evolved into a tightly coupled group of classes. It looked really hard about reasoning about any changes since the dependencies were pretty high. I think if you went with clusters of VMs talking to each other you could probably do a pretty good job. I do wonder if the work at Yale on Linda[1] & Tuple Spaces[2][3] would have been more popular when it was introduced in Java[4] then people would have reasoned a bit differently on big systems. Going the CORBA[5] route always seemed to generate really problematic systems. The again, I really thought it would be cool to have people program in Occam[6] just to force some thinking about organization of programs. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_(coordination_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_(coordination_language) 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space 3) https://books.google.com/books/about/Mirror_Worlds.html?id=jh2U379fq18C https://books.google.com/books/about/Mirror_Worlds.html?id=j... 4) https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076849/core-java/jini-technology--out-of-the-box.html https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076849/core-java/jini-tec... 5) http://www.corba.org/ http://www.corba.org/ 6) https://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~cs366/occam.pdf https://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~cs366/occam.pdf [PDF]
- shalabhc 9y ago
  Right - I think good ideas in Smalltalk are messaging (~actors) and the liveness. But the usual ST model is too 'flat' - all objects and classes live in the same space. This could be extended such that each object is a space in itself, with it's own inner objects - this model can then recursively scale up or down to multiple levels and also work for large systems. > work at Yale on Linda[1] & Tuple Spaces Ah, I see what you mean by loosely coupled. Yes, Linda is neat and if we think about objects/messaging with nested spaces, then each space can have its own form of messaging (could use tuple spaces, for instance). Also, I really like the cluster of VMs idea because you can then implement various kinds of cluster wide virtualizations on it (Croquet did this with Squeak VMs). I do think that cluster wide virtualization is the future of large programmable systems. We've built up some abstractions that work 'in the small' - we don't have to write assembly or do register allocation, but most 'languages' still limit you to think about what goes in within one Unix process, a very small part of the system. Whole system programming abstraction aren't really there yet.

nickpsecurity 9y ago

Look up Telescript or Obliq languages for interesting stuff that was agent-oriented.

protomyth 9y ago
I mentioned Telescript in my reply[1] to mercer[2]. Obliq is pretty cool (the implementation is really interesting), but not the type of agents I want. 1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408262 2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408159

mark_l_watson 9y ago

I wonder if there is a future for Pharo Smalltalk as a user interface and coding environment that uses backend services written in other languages. Last week I saw Python matplotlib bindings for Pharo and as I played with this, I thought of interfaces to TensorFlow, ML services at AWS, GCP, and Azure, etc. This idea probably does not make sense, but the idea hit me. EDIT: like a replacement for Jupyter, but more capable.

protomyth 9y ago
Technically, it should be possible to build a Pharo / Squeak environment in a dynamic language like Python or Ruby. I generally see it as more a cultural issue. Pharo (and Smalltalks in general) are very productive environments, but they live on the concept of live objects (Smalltalk in the form of an image-based development environment). Given the love of text editors and Unix-style file development, I doubt there would be a move in that direction.
scroot 9y ago
Amber [1] is a Smalltalk that you use to develop in a Web Browser, but which will compile for you to JS on the back end. [1] http://www.amber-lang.net/ http://www.amber-lang.net/