[HN Gopher] Learning Squeak (2019)
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Learning Squeak (2019)
Author : AlexeyBrin
Score : 66 points
Date : 2021-07-03 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.squeak.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.squeak.org)
| tyingq wrote:
| I really liked DabbleDB[1], written in Squeak with the Seaside
| framework. Twitter bought them in 2010, and shut it down.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB
| cwp wrote:
| Alas. Hard to believe it was all ten years ago now.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| dabble db went tragically obscure. they were arguably the first
| to have a server driven ui with state tracking done in the
| server. It was a brilliant solution to complex state at a time
| when spas were just crawling out of the ocean. The biggest
| challenge was scaling the management of all those individual
| user's states. Meteor and elixir liveview both are doing this
| now to varying degrees of success.
| jtchang wrote:
| I had a whole semester worth of Squeak at Georgia Tech. Can't
| really remember much at this point except that everything was an
| object and the environment we worked in was super slow.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Smalltalk has always been decades ahead of its time and it
| being slow on, say, the Alto or the Star, was kind of expected.
| That said, Squeak is very nimble compared to pretty much
| anything else currently in use. I'll assume your memory is from
| the late 90's and the computers were not particularly fast.
| sn41 wrote:
| Squeak gave me the greatest pleasure I had while programming. I
| was not a fan of IDEs till then, preferring vi at that point,
| with ctags.
|
| Sadly it is one of the places where computer science has gone
| backward, preferring more clunky systems and less elegant
| paradigms. Except when it comes to the higher reaches of the meta
| object hierarchy, Smalltalk itself is a great pleasure - Squeak
| was the icing on the cake for me.
| willtim wrote:
| > one of the places where computer science has gone backward,
| preferring more clunky systems and less elegant paradigms
|
| I respectfully disagree. Smalltalk has had its time. OOP has
| had plenty of investment and exploration, but it's
| fundamentally non-compositional and is a poor fit for modern
| hardware. Other paradigms, for example statically typed
| functional languages, are just as expressive (the expressive
| parts of Smalltalk were functional features anyway) and have
| much more to offer in terms of building reliable software that
| does not crash and is secure.
|
| Programming is hard, there is no silver bullet, but computer
| science _is_ moving forward.
| mpweiher wrote:
| 1. If OO is a poor fit for modern hardware, FP is much, much
| worse.
|
| 2. Actually OO is highly compositional.
|
| 3. The few actual studies that have been done disagree on
| static FP being more expressive (or safer). In fact, if you
| look at something like Mozart/Oz, they make the case that FP
| is _less_ expressive.
|
| 4. Agree there is no silver bullet. On the other hand, the
| gentleman who wrote "No Silver Bullet" actually also wrote
| that he viewed OO as one of the closest shots we have at a
| silver bullet. And 10 years later wrote that this turned out
| to be correct.
| willtim wrote:
| 1. FP is easier to optimise and is data-centric, which is
| much more useful for parallel processing. For example, game
| engines like Unity have been forced to move away from OOP
| and towards more data-centric architectures.
|
| 2. OO often features pervasive mutable state, which is
| hidden but not encapsulated. Side-effecting computations
| fundamentally do not compose. In the worst case, one ends
| up with a combinatorial explosion of the state space, good
| for simulations, but no so good for building systems one
| can easily reason about. This is what functional
| programming sets out to solve. OO does encourage modules,
| which is a good thing and can help with composition. But
| modules are not unique to OO.
|
| 3. Static typing is (obviously) safer than dynamic types.
| Smalltalk got most of its expressiveness from closures.
|
| 4. OO is clearly not a silver bullet. US academics need to
| invest more time in exploring functional programming (and
| actually teach it to their undergrads!).
| abecedarius wrote:
| As long as we're trading opinions: the OO vogue of
| 1990-2010ish and the anti-OO reaction since then were both
| too much a matter of fashion. OO and FP are both powerful
| ideas, neither dominates the other, sometimes you can combine
| them, and you don't have to declare allegiance to either.
| willtim wrote:
| The attraction of "functional programming" to academics and
| many others, is that the paradigm is underpinned by
| established and well studied mathematical logics. For
| example, the lambda calculus or more recently linear logic.
| You can view this as "fashion" if you like, but by making
| programming more formalized and less adhoc, it's probably
| better recognised as progress.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Those advantages aren't merely theoretical ... implicitly
| gained knowledge is extremely powerful in FP.
| sicromoft wrote:
| Why are we downvoting someone who is respectfully
| disagreeing?
| lalalandland wrote:
| OP said IDE, not object oriented programming. Most Smalltalk
| dialects have very nice programming environments that makes
| it much easier to be productive.
| rbanffy wrote:
| And even Smalltalk/80 was light years ahead of pretty much
| any IDE that came much later. It is a whole OS with
| integrated development and debugging tools.
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(page generated 2021-07-03 23:01 UTC)