On 21/12/2010, at 4:51 AM, Steve Wart wrote: > So is there anything interesting from a FONC perspective in mobile > devices? It may be a coincidence that Apple's success with the iPhone > is to a large extent due to a Smalltalk-derived C dialect, but most > people who know Smalltalk would agree that it's more like C than it is > Smalltalk. Apple's certainly made it clear that they've got little > appetite for dynamic languages on iOS (other than web apps), but the > reality is that keyboard-less mobile devices are not suitable for > programming activities at all, from any manufacturer.
I wouldn't really agree with this. Have you used Objective-C? I code in it daily, and Apple's frameworks and particularly the design patterns baked inherently into those frameworks make it so Smalltalk-like that I'm rather surprised you would say something like this. It *is* a dynamic language (assuming I know what you mean by dynamic here) - in other words, it uses live realtime message-sending. If you look at what Apple are doing with Grand-Central Dispatch, LLVM and their other realtime optimisation-focussed frameworks, you begin to see that they're very focussed on getting as much performance as they can from these devices, hence the focus on Objective-C (which is as close to smalltalk as we can get while being highly portable and optimised at the same time). I'd wager that just like switching architectures from PowerPC to Intel, if there was something better and more efficient, Apple would most likely have no issue or difficulty with switching to something else. This is kind of irrelevant, though, to FONC, because FONC obviously needs to be pure. Other interesting things are happening in other places... have you seen what Gemstone have done (is doing) with their implementation of their persisted distributed Ruby (which sits on top of their Smalltalk implementation). If any artefact FONC brings is relevant, it will obviously need to address persistence properlly... (The not-yet-finished ruby implementation is at http://www.gemstone.com/products/maglev) I'm not actually sure how relevant something that doesn't "join in the conversation" rather than try to reinvent EVERYTHING is, though... what I mean by that, is Apple have got very very good at layering their architecture with replaceable bits... I think this approach is infinitely useful, because it means if any single piece needs fixing, replacing or modification, then it can be re-tooled relatively easily and quickly. It's proper objected-orientedism. (For want of a better word). The fact that FONC have built O-META as a base artefact brings me immense excitement in relation to this, because O-META couldn't be a more functional implementable piece in the puzzle to the existing context of coding... the potential here is huge... being able to plug in various pieces of code in various languages is an amazing idea. (Assuming I'm properly interpreting what its potential is, though). Julian. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
