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Allow me to say that Smalltalk syntax can be really really similar to plain english sentences if you intentionally refactor it to optimize an elegant API. But (

Allow me to say that Smalltalk syntax can be really really similar to plain english sentences if you intentionally refactor it to optimize an elegant API. But (hairy topic) not every smalltalker will have talent for writing or taste or care at all about that, or at least enough to develop in that direction (which accidentally produces software friendlier to maintain and extend). It doesn't have to try to be natural language, AI/ML is close to achieve mimicing it properly [1], it just needs to feel comfortable enough for the programmer to tell computers how to behave in a way that has less cognitive load. The other questions you raise I think are very real and way more related to how power works among homo sapiens sapiens than computing languages. The software becomes an optimization of the power relationships created among individuals, groups and institutions/legalized-mafia-groups. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3

kkfx 5y ago
Hum, I can't really visualize how expert systems can "free us" from the need of programming and in general how a UI can "free us" from the need of "small talks between human and computer"... Oh sure, it's appealing speaking to my desktop something like "hey desktop, display a 3D animation of the world by population density, annual climate, natural resources, kind of society etc to help me see a good place to emigrate to according to my preferred criteria you already know", but we are decades behind such UIs and their real effectiveness is still much unknown even in philosophical terms because such UIs will definitive be non deterministic so it's a bit hard trust them in many cases, possibility of mere verification is next to impossible etc. It's not needed in many domains of course, for instance if I want a raw classification of scanned documents and most of them are well classified humans gets benefit from the raw ML classification, but not equally nice for a car's ADAS system that crush me against a wall because of an interpretation error. In Smalltalk terms: yes some listings can look like plain English but many others are not and that's not a real issue per se, the real issue is that original Smalltalk was imagined for a human-computer UI, moderns one are kind of lost programming environment, for instance how can I compose a documents with relevant graphs from data sources in various ways etc in Pharo? Because that should be the target of a human-computer UI... For such purpose Smalltalk is far from being easy to read and use...
- igouy 5y ago
  > compose a documents with relevant graphs from data sources in various ways etc Do you mean like the Analyst Spreadsheet Package from back-in-the-day? http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Products_Apr87.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ...
  - kkfx 5y ago
    Also, yes, I mean: most computer works are about information manipulation, retrieving, filtering, composing information. Such information might be text, images, videos, audios, "databases" etc and to manipulate, filter and compose we need something to do so as we wish. Still today there are no such "comprehensive tool" for anything like that, our modern most advanced tools are Notebook UIs like Jupyter or experiments like Wolfram Alpha. Emacs with org-mode is far more flexible than them and actively developed by still limited in graphics and usage terms. Xerox workstations of course are from a different era, and much less computing power but still they have had something, and they dream to evolve in that way. Modern Smalltalks seems to have forgotten this part, much focused on "the programming side", modern systems can't even reach something like old ones since they are "individual products" with very limited IPCs...
    - sebastianconcpt 5y ago
      Funny you mention that as lately I was fantasizing of a good, friendly and powerful terminal based[1] IDE for Smalltalk that you should be able to use to connect to running images. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface
      - kkfx 5y ago
        Curious, why you look for terminal-based environment? I understand that for CLI we have efficient FLOSS network connectivity (ssh) while for GUIs even if some good enough tools exists, some FLOSS (Apache Guacamole) they are pretty limited and complex to support everywhere but, said by one who "born" on unix, CLIs are nice and useful for many things, TUIs not much for reading and writing texts and graphics (framebuffer)... They tend IMO to be just good enough in certain cases, but not as a daily driver.

kkfx 5y ago

Hum, I can't really visualize how expert systems can "free us" from the need of programming and in general how a UI can "free us" from the need of "small talks between human and computer"... Oh sure, it's appealing speaking to my desktop something like "hey desktop, display a 3D animation of the world by population density, annual climate, natural resources, kind of society etc to help me see a good place to emigrate to according to my preferred criteria you already know", but we are decades behind such UIs and their real effectiveness is still much unknown even in philosophical terms because such UIs will definitive be non deterministic so it's a bit hard trust them in many cases, possibility of mere verification is next to impossible etc. It's not needed in many domains of course, for instance if I want a raw classification of scanned documents and most of them are well classified humans gets benefit from the raw ML classification, but not equally nice for a car's ADAS system that crush me against a wall because of an interpretation error. In Smalltalk terms: yes some listings can look like plain English but many others are not and that's not a real issue per se, the real issue is that original Smalltalk was imagined for a human-computer UI, moderns one are kind of lost programming environment, for instance how can I compose a documents with relevant graphs from data sources in various ways etc in Pharo? Because that should be the target of a human-computer UI... For such purpose Smalltalk is far from being easy to read and use...

igouy 5y ago
> compose a documents with relevant graphs from data sources in various ways etc Do you mean like the Analyst Spreadsheet Package from back-in-the-day? http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Products_Apr87.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ...
- kkfx 5y ago
  Also, yes, I mean: most computer works are about information manipulation, retrieving, filtering, composing information. Such information might be text, images, videos, audios, "databases" etc and to manipulate, filter and compose we need something to do so as we wish. Still today there are no such "comprehensive tool" for anything like that, our modern most advanced tools are Notebook UIs like Jupyter or experiments like Wolfram Alpha. Emacs with org-mode is far more flexible than them and actively developed by still limited in graphics and usage terms. Xerox workstations of course are from a different era, and much less computing power but still they have had something, and they dream to evolve in that way. Modern Smalltalks seems to have forgotten this part, much focused on "the programming side", modern systems can't even reach something like old ones since they are "individual products" with very limited IPCs...
  - sebastianconcpt 5y ago
    Funny you mention that as lately I was fantasizing of a good, friendly and powerful terminal based[1] IDE for Smalltalk that you should be able to use to connect to running images. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface
    - kkfx 5y ago
      Curious, why you look for terminal-based environment? I understand that for CLI we have efficient FLOSS network connectivity (ssh) while for GUIs even if some good enough tools exists, some FLOSS (Apache Guacamole) they are pretty limited and complex to support everywhere but, said by one who "born" on unix, CLIs are nice and useful for many things, TUIs not much for reading and writing texts and graphics (framebuffer)... They tend IMO to be just good enough in certain cases, but not as a daily driver.