Markus
9/28/2004 6:03:00 AM
On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 21:37, Matt Lawrence wrote:
> Smalltalk is a complete environment where the system can see all of itself
> all the time. While it was never done, I find the idea of being able to
> spend trillions of spare CPU cycles doing optimization quite appealing.
I've loved smalltalk from my first encounter with it back in 1980.
But very early in that encounter I learned just how dangerous a system
that "can see all of itself all the time" can be. I had a few clever
ideas that I wanted to try, and in the process of trying them I got to
learn all about rolling back & salvaging objects from corrupted system
images.
Not to say that it wasn't fun...
> it's not really applicable to Ruby as long
> as Ruby is just a language and not the entire environment.
That's probably the main reason I use ruby over smalltalk: ruby is
more--not quite sure what word I want here--secular? adaptive? humble
maybe? Smalltalk is wonderful as smalltalk, but ruby is easier to wedge
in to the interstitial spaces of a real system.
-- MarkusQ