4 ms·

I find preferences-wars a source of evil. Lisp is fine, not the subject here, tho. Back to the subject, Smalltalk's syntax allows the most elegant expression o

I find preferences-wars a source of evil. Lisp is fine, not the subject here, tho. Back to the subject, Smalltalk's syntax allows the most elegant expression of computer code similar to natural written language I've seen. And that at the lowest cognitive load to learn and read that the computer world provided so far. I'm with you about raising the importance on concepts and that humanity needs to rescue its capacity for making that relevant again. I'm afraid Post-modernism is liquifying intelligence and is making everything regarding to intelligence to be harder to flourish. PS: We use a lot of camel case but please remember it's Smalltalk (instead of SmallTalk).

dgb23 5y ago
It has nothing to do with philosophical concepts and everything with business culture. There are tools that facilitate expression, innovation and individual contribution. And there are tools that make it easier to scale and for programmers to be interchangeable. These two are very hard to unify. There’s cross pollination but that’s about it. Whether you’re in a top down hierarchical business model or in one that’s more open and people centric has a significant impact on which type of tools you’re using. Smalltalk, Lisp and their descendants belong to the former category. They are immersive, expressive and incredibly dynamic and their communities are often pioneers. But this type of freedom comes at a cost that some do not want to pay.
- sebastianconcpt 5y ago
  I agree with everything you said except your first sentence :D
- kkfx 5y ago
  > But this type of freedom comes at a cost that some do not want to pay. Who are those some? Managers or techie? Because yes, business choose to do it's best avoiding Smalltalk, Lisp etc for business reasons, but those reasons are not "their cost" but the fact that with them anything is open, integrated, there are not countless of individual "product" to be sold, well welded so to guarantee that no one can temper them etc. It's a bit like modern "open source enterprise" monsters, they are not monsters because doing so make easy changes people involved in a project, find people skilled in that field etc but because being monsters it's cheap to pay enterprise support instead of deal with issues internally, re-write from scratch instead of forking etc. While these days Smalltalk and Lisp are just programming environments on a host OS in the past they were the OS and so the OS is a unique environment not a container cargo ship with containers on top, anything rigidly separated, that's the business reasons behind industry choice IMO...
kkfx 5y ago
> We use a lot of camel case but please remember it's Smalltalk (instead of SmallTalk). Thanks, correction registered :-) I agree about preferences-war, I generally tell my preference not to start flame but to give something for a positive discussion, witch means "how many in a community prefer $this more than $that and why" but less about the "similarity" with a natural language: in nature we use words as tags, so "objects" are natural, message passing is "natural" in the sense of collaboration between humans, but not really in the OOP sense. Also Smalltalk syntax to me does not look much similar to natural language. The most similar language I found so far is Python, imperative programming is not so effective but is easier than functional for newcomers and it's syntax is very easy to read, IMVHO that's the reason of it's popularity especially compared with very similar (in targets) languages like Perl or Ruby. Lisp is easy once you have learned a bit, and probably that's one part of why is not much popular, the rest, in common with Smalltalk is that both are designed for user programming, while "modern industry" want to lock users depriving them of any possible freedom and free usage of a desktop. In the past that was the IBM doctrine, thereafter the GAFAM doctrine: they all born out of Xerox tech, small part of it, wrapped in ways that put a product, a service at the center instead of the human. It's not only about liquefying intelligence but a mean to make hard doing certain things. A stupid example: we have Wikidata, SPARQL is not that a great and digestible language but it's there, why the hell it's not normal just for a middle-school simple research query Wikidata form "a buffer" (in the Emacs sense of that) and see results in various forms we can manipulate to plot graphs etc at a level easy enough for a middle-school small student research? That's because IMVHO making easy doing so means users have power in their own hand, they can move not only in pre-defined and controllable paths but independently. Why aggregators vs personal aggregators with RSS+Xerox style scoring? Again because aggregators might satisfy users demand BUT matching them to their hoster desire, for instance silencing or discrediting some news and enlarging others (try to see the recent polemics about Meta vs TikTok PR campaign) while a personal one can't be tweaked from remote so users might find their own path with their own ideas and tools. Why "internet banking website" instead of a common standard API (like EU OpenBank, but open for all) with a desktop client? With it, users can have their transactions digitally-signed on their own desktop, having multiple banks and banking services in the same place, with the same UI etc without we have surveillance on crappy banking websites, crappy authentication, nothing in our hands etc. All those things have a common ground: modern/classic software development is compartmentalized with any human layer religiously separated from the others, ancient programming languages are designed for a coherent unique environment without barriers.

dgb23 5y ago

It has nothing to do with philosophical concepts and everything with business culture. There are tools that facilitate expression, innovation and individual contribution. And there are tools that make it easier to scale and for programmers to be interchangeable. These two are very hard to unify. There’s cross pollination but that’s about it. Whether you’re in a top down hierarchical business model or in one that’s more open and people centric has a significant impact on which type of tools you’re using. Smalltalk, Lisp and their descendants belong to the former category. They are immersive, expressive and incredibly dynamic and their communities are often pioneers. But this type of freedom comes at a cost that some do not want to pay.

sebastianconcpt 5y ago
I agree with everything you said except your first sentence :D
kkfx 5y ago
> But this type of freedom comes at a cost that some do not want to pay. Who are those some? Managers or techie? Because yes, business choose to do it's best avoiding Smalltalk, Lisp etc for business reasons, but those reasons are not "their cost" but the fact that with them anything is open, integrated, there are not countless of individual "product" to be sold, well welded so to guarantee that no one can temper them etc. It's a bit like modern "open source enterprise" monsters, they are not monsters because doing so make easy changes people involved in a project, find people skilled in that field etc but because being monsters it's cheap to pay enterprise support instead of deal with issues internally, re-write from scratch instead of forking etc. While these days Smalltalk and Lisp are just programming environments on a host OS in the past they were the OS and so the OS is a unique environment not a container cargo ship with containers on top, anything rigidly separated, that's the business reasons behind industry choice IMO...

kkfx 5y ago

> We use a lot of camel case but please remember it's Smalltalk (instead of SmallTalk). Thanks, correction registered :-) I agree about preferences-war, I generally tell my preference not to start flame but to give something for a positive discussion, witch means "how many in a community prefer $this more than $that and why" but less about the "similarity" with a natural language: in nature we use words as tags, so "objects" are natural, message passing is "natural" in the sense of collaboration between humans, but not really in the OOP sense. Also Smalltalk syntax to me does not look much similar to natural language. The most similar language I found so far is Python, imperative programming is not so effective but is easier than functional for newcomers and it's syntax is very easy to read, IMVHO that's the reason of it's popularity especially compared with very similar (in targets) languages like Perl or Ruby. Lisp is easy once you have learned a bit, and probably that's one part of why is not much popular, the rest, in common with Smalltalk is that both are designed for user programming, while "modern industry" want to lock users depriving them of any possible freedom and free usage of a desktop. In the past that was the IBM doctrine, thereafter the GAFAM doctrine: they all born out of Xerox tech, small part of it, wrapped in ways that put a product, a service at the center instead of the human. It's not only about liquefying intelligence but a mean to make hard doing certain things. A stupid example: we have Wikidata, SPARQL is not that a great and digestible language but it's there, why the hell it's not normal just for a middle-school simple research query Wikidata form "a buffer" (in the Emacs sense of that) and see results in various forms we can manipulate to plot graphs etc at a level easy enough for a middle-school small student research? That's because IMVHO making easy doing so means users have power in their own hand, they can move not only in pre-defined and controllable paths but independently. Why aggregators vs personal aggregators with RSS+Xerox style scoring? Again because aggregators might satisfy users demand BUT matching them to their hoster desire, for instance silencing or discrediting some news and enlarging others (try to see the recent polemics about Meta vs TikTok PR campaign) while a personal one can't be tweaked from remote so users might find their own path with their own ideas and tools. Why "internet banking website" instead of a common standard API (like EU OpenBank, but open for all) with a desktop client? With it, users can have their transactions digitally-signed on their own desktop, having multiple banks and banking services in the same place, with the same UI etc without we have surveillance on crappy banking websites, crappy authentication, nothing in our hands etc. All those things have a common ground: modern/classic software development is compartmentalized with any human layer religiously separated from the others, ancient programming languages are designed for a coherent unique environment without barriers.