Re: [SL4] Flare, and the need for it.

From: Michael McGee (michaelmcgee@mail.michaelmcgee.com)
Date: Thu Mar 16 2000 - 23:02:33 MST


Have you considered writing your programs in Smalltalk? Smalltalkers
believe that everything can be written better in Smalltalk.

Here are some advantages of Smalltalk:

1)

     Smaltalk is the most object oriented language possible. In fact,
     if you define a pure object oriented language you will always have
     Smalltalk or a Smalltalk dialect. Because that is what Smalltalk
     is: pure objects and messages between the objects.

2)

     Smalltalk can access every aspect of itself which means you can
     change or rewrite it however you like. You can even write your
     own programming language if you like.

3)

     Since Smalltalk has dynamic typing you can make it write its own
     code. This is essential for A/I and Agent technology.

4)

     You can rewrite the code of active apps (running) as long as the
     message interface upon which the functioning of other system
     objects is not destroyed.

Here are some Smalltalk Links:

http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/byte_aug81/design_principles_behind_smalltalk.html

http://www.rase.com/oodebate/choices.htm
http://www.goodstart.com/article2.html
http://www.stic.org/Research/IDC97/stic.htm
http://www.objectshare.com/VWoverJava.htm
http://squeak.org/
http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_smalltalk.html
http://smalltalk.org/
 http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/smalltalk-faq/faq.html

"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:

> From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
>
> Randall Randall wrote:
> >
> > You can look at this feature by using
> > (documentation whatever-function-or-symbol-you-want
> > (type-of whatever-function-or-symbol-you-want))
> > and what you will see is a quoted string, with no limit
> > of which I am aware on size.
>
> "Comment" is the wrong word, perhaps. "Annotation" would be better. A
> quoted string won't suffice - you need key-value pairs, and the keys
> need metadata. Furthermore, that annotation has to be doable as a
> natural idiom, and the language libraries need to support it.
>
> It's possible to write shallow LISP programs in C, but not deep ones.
> Same goes for writing Flare programs in LISP.
> --
> sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
> http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
> Member, Extropy Institute
> Senior Associate, Foresight Institute
>
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--
Sincerely,
Michael McGee
11124 NE Halsey, 461
Portland  OR  97220
Phone: 503/262-7108
E-Mail: michaelmcgee@mail.michaelmcgee.com
Programming Web Site:
[ http://www.michaelmcgee.com/deepmagic/deepmagic.htm ]
Business Web Site:
[ http://www.michaelmcgee.com ]


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