This is better than that
It is really interesting when people highlight different parts of the same article when they interest them. Lispers and Smalltalkers usually get along quite well. I have hardly ever seen one say a bad thing about the other. I found this rather interesting, especially the pick of quotes. This refers to quotes picked out from Ted Leung's post.
From a primarily Lisp blog.
Lisp is the number one programming language idea of all time. Smalltalk's contribution was to build encapsulation on top of the ideas in Lisp. Someone asked a question about the market voting or something like this. Kay's reply went something like this: Most people don't understand Lisp -- does that make it bad? Most people understand Maxwell's equations -- does that make them bad? One of the things that Kay is doing now is just going around and giving talks to remind people of the great ideas in Lisp and Doug Engelbart's work
From a primarily Smalltalk blog.
Much as I love Lisp, it seems to me that the Smalltalk community, led by folks like Kay, are continuing to demonstrate a convincing agenda for forward progress, while the Lisp community is perennially struggling with basic infrastructure issues like which dialect of Lisp/Scheme, which windowing environment, etc. Perhaps this is due to the conception of Smalltalk as a system, in addition to a language.
Heh?
posted by Sanjay Pande at
4:27 AM
3 Comments:
That seems an odd position for the Smalltalkers to take. From my limited experience with Smalltalk it seems like yes, they do have a standard language. But the standard language isn't sufficient to actually do anything. What you need to accomplish anything is to have the standard language + the standard library (since Smalltalk is a smaller language than Common Lisp).
But, unfortunately, the Smalltalk library isn't standard, and that hampers fielding any Smalltalk app...
This is James Robertson, the Smalltalk guy you quoted. What isn't clear from your post is that the Smalltalk quote is from Ted Leung, an old time Lisper. I merely highlighted that part of his commentary...
Hi james,
I enjoy reading your weblog, mainly because I came to Lisp by way of Smalltalk. I used to work for Purdue University which had Cincom Smalltalk and a hacker there exposed me to Lisp. Anyway, both those quotes are from Ted Leungs blog as I have mentioned. Its only interesting what two different people chose to highlight - Thats all ;-)
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home