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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Why not Smalltalk? 5 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Both Lisp and Smalltalk are almost hostile to cooperation with other software. Smalltalk is the poster child for this, of course -- Squeak may be a wonderful environment (it's fun, I've tried it), but using a computer productively is all about interacting with other programs, handling files, and talking to other machines, and it's hard to interact with programs outside the Smalltalk VM. In Lisp, this shows up as a "better is worse" syndrome, where you have a nice language with a large standard library, but still no standard POSIX interface, and a bizarre pathname facility that I typically try to ignore.

    Perl may be ugly, but it is IMHO one of the best languages out there for interacting with other programs and foreign libraries on a Unix system. I think the Lispniks may be catching onto this, but Lisp has so many years of bad reputation to live down...

    • "interacting with other programs, handling files, and talking to other machines"
      Why don't you think Smalltalk supports "handling files"?

      How do you want to interact with other programs, and machines?
      Corba? Sockets? SOAP? CGI? COM? DLLs/Shared libraries? inline C-code? [exept.de]

      Here's the VisualWorks Smalltalks documentation [cincom.com]
      • Alright, you RTFMed me pretty good there. Having only used two smalltalks (GNU ST and Squeak), and those only briefly, I made the same mistake many people do with Scheme: there are a bunch of languages out there called Scheme, some supporting practical extensions beyond the standard. Using the wrong "Scheme", or only reading the standard, you get the impression that the language doesn't have much built in. With Scheme, I've been fortunate enough to be exposed to both Bigloo and PLT, two implementations w
        • 'RTFMed me'
          We all seem to mix up language and language implementation ;-)

          'scripting in the "shell scripting" sense'
          That's something Perl was designed for, and not something Smalltalk was designed for.
          Having said that, once we start thinking about web apps, take a look at Seaside [beta4.com].
          • We all seem to mix up language and language implementation ;-)
            I think we also seem to mix up implementation (the interpreter, compiler, or whatever that makes programs run on a machine) and "implementation" (the non-standard extensions an implementation supports). GCC is IMHO rightly slammed for supporting a host of weird extensions to the C language -- however useful they are, with the exception of inline asm, I don't think many people consider them a positive feature, since they lead to nonportable code
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