Re: [Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms

2009-07-29 Thread David Mitchell
I don't think there is a misunderstanding. There is disagreement. You
don't correct disagreement.

Alan Kay feels his influence was from biology (and other things,
including LISP).

Richard finds flaws in the analogy.

No misunderstanding.



On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 12:38 AM, Benjamin L.
Russelldekudekup...@yahoo.com wrote:
 Below is a message I posted to correct Richard O'Keefe's
 misunderstanding in understanding the significance of biology as one
 of the origins of Smalltalk [1] (see
 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61718):

Incidentally, just for the record, in response to my forwarding your
claim, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, just refuted your
refutation [1] (see
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html);
_viz._:

I most definitely still think of OOP at its best as being biological.

[1] Kay, Alan. [Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and
Algorithms. The Beginners Archives. Squeak.org. 24 July 2009. 27 July
2009. 
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html.

 Nevertheless, O'Keefe now still insists that Smalltalk did not
 originate in biology [2] (see
 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61749);
 _viz._:

 On Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:35:09 +1200, in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe
 Richard O'Keefe o...@cs.otago.ac.nz wrote:


On Jul 27, 2009, at 6:30 PM, Benjamin L.Russell wrote:
 Incidentally, just for the record, in response to my forwarding your
 claim, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, just refuted your
 refutation [1] (see
 http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html)
 ;
 _viz._:

If you read carefully what he wrote there,
it doesn't actually contradict what I said.
(For what it's worth, I _have_ read a good deal of
Alan Kay's writings.)

Molecular biology may very well have been an influence
on Alan Kay, but there are no traces of it in Smalltalk.
The concepts of Smalltalk have their roots in Lisp,
including the original version using nil as false, and
the meta-circular interpreter.

Sketchpad and Simula also have no trace of biology in them.

As for the claim that Smalltalk had its roots in Lisp,
this is not my opinion.  It's straight from the horse's
mouth.  Visit

http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_IV.html
whose title is The first real Smalltalk, and you will read
this paragraph:

I had orignally made the boast because McCarthy's
  self-describing LISP interpreter was written in itself.
  It was about a page, and as far as power goes,
  LISP was the whole nine-yards for functional languages.
  I was quite sure I could do the same for object-oriented
  languages plus be able to do a resonable syntax for the
  code a loa some of the FLEX machine techiques.
[Errors in the page.]

So clearly Alan Kay _was_ influenced by Lisp,
and the initial Smalltalk-72 implementation _was_
influenced by the Lisp meta-circular interpreter.

While we're on that page, here are the six core principles:
   1. Everything is an object
      [Where's the biology in that?  Rocks are objects.]
   2. Objects communicate by sending and receiving messages
      (in terms of objects)
      [Where's the biology in that?  Sounds more like the
      telephone system.  And when organisms send messages
      to other organisms, those messages are not themselves
      organisms, although that might make a neat gimmick for
      a science fiction story.]
   3. Objects have their own memory (in terms of objects)
      [Many organisms have memory.  But their memories are
      not themselves organisms.  Again that might make a
      nice science fiction gimmick, and Brin's hydrogen
      breathers in the Uplift series come close.  Not in THIS
      biology though.]
   4. Every object is an instance of a class
      (which must be an object)
      [Maybe here's the biology?  But no, Simula 67 had
      single-inheritance classes, with never a trace of
      biology.  There's certainly no biology-talk in the
      Simula Common Base manual that I can find.  Again, in
      THIS biology, a taxon is not itself an organism,
      so if anything, Smalltalk is contradicting biology.]
   5. The class holds the shared behavior for its instances
      (in the form of objects in a pogram list)
      [Errors in the page.  Where's the biology here?
      Organisms behave, but their behaviour isn't made of
      organisms held in another organism.  Class as site of
      shared behaviour is straight Simula (and of course
      other sources).]
   6. To eval a program list, control is passed to the first
      object and the remainder is treated as its message
      [Does that look like biology to you?]

A PDF of the whole thing is
http://www.smalltalk.org/downloads/papers/SmalltalkHistoryHOPL.pdf

But how important is that paper anyway?
(1) It's by Alan Kay.
(2) It's his official history of Smalltalk.
(3) It actually says on the second page I will try to show
     where

[Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms

2009-07-29 Thread Klaus D. Witzel

On Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:57:22 +0200, David Mitchell wrote:


I don't think there is a misunderstanding. There is disagreement. You
don't correct disagreement.

Alan Kay feels his influence was from biology (and other things,
including LISP).

Richard finds flaws in the analogy.

No misunderstanding.


+1

Only disagreement and lots of ... in Smalltalk ... missing from the  
listing of the six core principles' POV.


And thank you very much Ben for writing this all up. I love it :)

/Klaus



On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 12:38 AM, Benjamin L.
Russelldekudekup...@yahoo.com wrote:

Below is a message I posted to correct Richard O'Keefe's
misunderstanding in understanding the significance of biology as one
of the origins of Smalltalk [1] (see
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61718):


Incidentally, just for the record, in response to my forwarding your
claim, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, just refuted your
refutation [1] (see
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html);
_viz._:

I most definitely still think of OOP at its best as being  
biological.


[1] Kay, Alan. [Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and
Algorithms. The Beginners Archives. Squeak.org. 24 July 2009. 27 July
2009.  
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html.


Nevertheless, O'Keefe now still insists that Smalltalk did not
originate in biology [2] (see
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61749);
_viz._:

On Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:35:09 +1200, in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe
Richard O'Keefe o...@cs.otago.ac.nz wrote:



On Jul 27, 2009, at 6:30 PM, Benjamin L.Russell wrote:

Incidentally, just for the record, in response to my forwarding your
claim, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, just refuted your
refutation [1] (see
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html)
;
_viz._:


If you read carefully what he wrote there,
it doesn't actually contradict what I said.
(For what it's worth, I _have_ read a good deal of
Alan Kay's writings.)

Molecular biology may very well have been an influence
on Alan Kay, but there are no traces of it in Smalltalk.
The concepts of Smalltalk have their roots in Lisp,
including the original version using nil as false, and
the meta-circular interpreter.

Sketchpad and Simula also have no trace of biology in them.

As for the claim that Smalltalk had its roots in Lisp,
this is not my opinion.  It's straight from the horse's
mouth.  Visit

http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_IV.html
whose title is The first real Smalltalk, and you will read
this paragraph:

I had orignally made the boast because McCarthy's
 self-describing LISP interpreter was written in itself.
 It was about a page, and as far as power goes,
 LISP was the whole nine-yards for functional languages.
 I was quite sure I could do the same for object-oriented
 languages plus be able to do a resonable syntax for the
 code a loa some of the FLEX machine techiques.
[Errors in the page.]

So clearly Alan Kay _was_ influenced by Lisp,
and the initial Smalltalk-72 implementation _was_
influenced by the Lisp meta-circular interpreter.

While we're on that page, here are the six core principles:
  1. Everything is an object
     [Where's the biology in that?  Rocks are objects.]
  2. Objects communicate by sending and receiving messages
     (in terms of objects)
     [Where's the biology in that?  Sounds more like the
     telephone system.  And when organisms send messages
     to other organisms, those messages are not themselves
     organisms, although that might make a neat gimmick for
     a science fiction story.]
  3. Objects have their own memory (in terms of objects)
     [Many organisms have memory.  But their memories are
     not themselves organisms.  Again that might make a
     nice science fiction gimmick, and Brin's hydrogen
     breathers in the Uplift series come close.  Not in THIS
     biology though.]
  4. Every object is an instance of a class
     (which must be an object)
     [Maybe here's the biology?  But no, Simula 67 had
     single-inheritance classes, with never a trace of
     biology.  There's certainly no biology-talk in the
     Simula Common Base manual that I can find.  Again, in
     THIS biology, a taxon is not itself an organism,
     so if anything, Smalltalk is contradicting biology.]
  5. The class holds the shared behavior for its instances
     (in the form of objects in a pogram list)
     [Errors in the page.  Where's the biology here?
     Organisms behave, but their behaviour isn't made of
     organisms held in another organism.  Class as site of
     shared behaviour is straight Simula (and of course
     other sources).]
  6. To eval a program list, control is passed to the first
     object and the remainder is treated as its message
     [Does that look like biology to you?]

A PDF of the whole thing is
http://www.smalltalk.org/downloads

[Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms

2009-07-28 Thread Benjamin L . Russell
Below is a message I posted to correct Richard O'Keefe's
misunderstanding in understanding the significance of biology as one
of the origins of Smalltalk [1] (see
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61718):

Incidentally, just for the record, in response to my forwarding your
claim, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, just refuted your
refutation [1] (see
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html);
_viz._:

I most definitely still think of OOP at its best as being biological.

[1] Kay, Alan. [Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and
Algorithms. The Beginners Archives. Squeak.org. 24 July 2009. 27 July
2009. 
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html.

Nevertheless, O'Keefe now still insists that Smalltalk did not
originate in biology [2] (see
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61749);
_viz._:

On Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:35:09 +1200, in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe
Richard O'Keefe o...@cs.otago.ac.nz wrote:


On Jul 27, 2009, at 6:30 PM, Benjamin L.Russell wrote:
 Incidentally, just for the record, in response to my forwarding your
 claim, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, just refuted your
 refutation [1] (see
 http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html) 
 ;
 _viz._:

If you read carefully what he wrote there,
it doesn't actually contradict what I said.
(For what it's worth, I _have_ read a good deal of
Alan Kay's writings.)

Molecular biology may very well have been an influence
on Alan Kay, but there are no traces of it in Smalltalk.
The concepts of Smalltalk have their roots in Lisp,
including the original version using nil as false, and
the meta-circular interpreter.

Sketchpad and Simula also have no trace of biology in them.

As for the claim that Smalltalk had its roots in Lisp,
this is not my opinion.  It's straight from the horse's
mouth.  Visit

http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_IV.html
whose title is The first real Smalltalk, and you will read
this paragraph:

I had orignally made the boast because McCarthy's
  self-describing LISP interpreter was written in itself.
  It was about a page, and as far as power goes,
  LISP was the whole nine-yards for functional languages.
  I was quite sure I could do the same for object-oriented
  languages plus be able to do a resonable syntax for the
  code a loa some of the FLEX machine techiques.
[Errors in the page.]

So clearly Alan Kay _was_ influenced by Lisp,
and the initial Smalltalk-72 implementation _was_
influenced by the Lisp meta-circular interpreter.

While we're on that page, here are the six core principles:
   1. Everything is an object
  [Where's the biology in that?  Rocks are objects.]
   2. Objects communicate by sending and receiving messages
  (in terms of objects)
  [Where's the biology in that?  Sounds more like the
  telephone system.  And when organisms send messages
  to other organisms, those messages are not themselves
  organisms, although that might make a neat gimmick for
  a science fiction story.]
   3. Objects have their own memory (in terms of objects)
  [Many organisms have memory.  But their memories are
  not themselves organisms.  Again that might make a
  nice science fiction gimmick, and Brin's hydrogen
  breathers in the Uplift series come close.  Not in THIS
  biology though.]
   4. Every object is an instance of a class
  (which must be an object)
  [Maybe here's the biology?  But no, Simula 67 had
  single-inheritance classes, with never a trace of
  biology.  There's certainly no biology-talk in the
  Simula Common Base manual that I can find.  Again, in
  THIS biology, a taxon is not itself an organism,
  so if anything, Smalltalk is contradicting biology.]
   5. The class holds the shared behavior for its instances
  (in the form of objects in a pogram list)
  [Errors in the page.  Where's the biology here?
  Organisms behave, but their behaviour isn't made of
  organisms held in another organism.  Class as site of
  shared behaviour is straight Simula (and of course
  other sources).]
   6. To eval a program list, control is passed to the first
  object and the remainder is treated as its message
  [Does that look like biology to you?]

A PDF of the whole thing is
http://www.smalltalk.org/downloads/papers/SmalltalkHistoryHOPL.pdf

But how important is that paper anyway?
(1) It's by Alan Kay.
(2) It's his official history of Smalltalk.
(3) It actually says on the second page I will try to show
 where most of the influences come from.

It's true that the abstract speaks of a more biological
scheme of protected universal cells interacting only through
messages that could mimic any desired behavior, but that's
basically _it_ for biology, if we are to believe Kay, and
even then, its semantics are a bit like having thousands

[Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms

2009-07-24 Thread Benjamin L . Russell
On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:25:34 +0530, K. K. Subramaniam
subb...@gmail.com wrote:

Concepts in Squeak have their origins 
in biology rather than in computational math. The boundary between 'hardware' 
and 'software' is blurry. See the reading list at
   http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
particularly The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

Richard O'Keefe refutes this claim in his post [1] Re: Re: [Haskell]
Re: 20 years ago, dated 2009-07-16 01:38:14 GMT, on the
Haskell-Cafe mailing list (see
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61329);
_viz._:

 Concepts in Squeak [a dialect and implementation of Smalltalk] have
 their origins
 in biology rather than in computational math

That posting is wrong.

Smalltalk's roots are very firmly planted in Lisp,
with perhaps a touch of Logo (which also had its roots in Lisp).
The classic Smalltalk-76 paper even contains a meta-circular
interpreter, which I found reminiscent of the old Lisp one.
The biological metaphor in Smalltalk is actually a SOCIAL
metaphor: sending and receiving messages, and a social
model of agents with memory exchanging messages naturally
leads to anthropomorphisms.

The other classic OO language, which inspired C++, which
inspired Java, which inspired C#, is Simula 67, which has
its roots in Algol 60.  While Simula 67 was sometimes used
for simulating biological processes, the main background
was discrete event systems like factories and shops; there
are no biological metaphors in Simula.

-- Benjamin L. Russell

[1] O'Keefe, Richard. Re: Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago.
gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 16 July 2009. 24 July 2009.
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61329.
-- 
Benjamin L. Russell  /   DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com
http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/
Translator/Interpreter / Mobile:  +011 81 80-3603-6725
Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto. 
-- Matsuo Basho^ 

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Re: [Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms

2009-07-24 Thread David Mitchell
I think K.K. is referring to the writings of Alan Kay, who is pretty
authoritative when it comes to Smalltalk. In his paper, The Early
History of Smalltalk, published by the ACM in History of Programming
Languages II (1993).

My biology minor had focused on both cell metabolism and larger scale
morphogenesis with its notions of simple mechanisms controlling
complex processes and one kind of building block able to differentiate
into all needed building blocks. The 220 file system, the B5000,
Sketchpad, and finally Simula, all used the same idea for different
purposes. Bob Barton, the main designer of the B5000 and a professor
at Utah had said in one of his talks a few days earlier: The basic
principal of recursive design is to make the parts have the same power
as the whole. For the first time I thought of the whole as the entire
computer and wondered why anyone would want to divide it up into
weaker things called data structures and procedures. Why not divide it
up into little computers, as time sharing was starting to? But not in
dozens. Why not thousands of them, each simulating a useful structure?


Online here: http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html


On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 1:37 AM, Benjamin L.
Russelldekudekup...@yahoo.com wrote:
 On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:25:34 +0530, K. K. Subramaniam
 subb...@gmail.com wrote:

Concepts in Squeak have their origins
in biology rather than in computational math. The boundary between 'hardware'
and 'software' is blurry. See the reading list at
   http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
particularly The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

 Richard O'Keefe refutes this claim in his post [1] Re: Re: [Haskell]
 Re: 20 years ago, dated 2009-07-16 01:38:14 GMT, on the
 Haskell-Cafe mailing list (see
 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61329);
 _viz._:

 Concepts in Squeak [a dialect and implementation of Smalltalk] have
 their origins
 in biology rather than in computational math

That posting is wrong.

Smalltalk's roots are very firmly planted in Lisp,
with perhaps a touch of Logo (which also had its roots in Lisp).
The classic Smalltalk-76 paper even contains a meta-circular
interpreter, which I found reminiscent of the old Lisp one.
The biological metaphor in Smalltalk is actually a SOCIAL
metaphor: sending and receiving messages, and a social
model of agents with memory exchanging messages naturally
leads to anthropomorphisms.

The other classic OO language, which inspired C++, which
inspired Java, which inspired C#, is Simula 67, which has
its roots in Algol 60.  While Simula 67 was sometimes used
for simulating biological processes, the main background
was discrete event systems like factories and shops; there
are no biological metaphors in Simula.

 -- Benjamin L. Russell

 [1] O'Keefe, Richard. Re: Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago.
 gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 16 July 2009. 24 July 2009.
 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61329.
 --
 Benjamin L. Russell  /   DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com
 http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/
 Translator/Interpreter / Mobile:  +011 81 80-3603-6725
 Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto.
 -- Matsuo Basho^

 ___
 Beginners mailing list
 Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org
 http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners

___
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Re: [Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms

2009-06-29 Thread Benjamin L. Russell
--- On Mon, 6/29/09, K. K. Subramaniam subb...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Monday 29 Jun 2009 10:07:30 am
 Benjamin L. Russell wrote:
  Is there a counterpart to SICP (_Structure and
 Interpretation of
  Computer Programs_; see http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) focusing on
  roughly the same topics from a purely object-oriented
 standpoint, but
  using Smalltalk, in particular Squeak, as a means
 rather than as an
  end?
 There is no single book to my knowledge. Concepts in Squeak
 have their origins 
 in biology rather than in computational math. The boundary
 between 'hardware' 
 and 'software' is blurry. See the reading list at
    http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
 particularly The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

Fascinating.  So an object is an abstract representation of a gene,
rather than a blueprint for a computational process  This is a
revelation.

 
  One aspect that I really miss in Squeak is more focus
 on theory.  It
  would be nice if somebody presented a proof of
 correctness of a purely
  object-oriented algorithm that was
 implementation-independent.
 Squeak is conceived to work more like an organism than a
 mechanism so concepts 
 like proof of correctness does not translate easily into
 such an environment. 
 PoC applies to computations small enough to be
 'intellectually manageable' 
 while Squeak tackles the big picture as a continously
 evolving gestalt of 
 objects and interactions. The closest document that
 captures the essence of 
 Squeak is the NSF Proposal at
    http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2006002_nsfprop.pdf

Yes, that paper is indeed interesting: in particular, the following
portion:

In Biology [Bio], one of our favorite sources of fruitful analogies, 
the scaling of entities is not smooth but jumps from rather small 
carbon based molecules to much larger entire cells that can play 
many kinds of roles derived from very similar architectures.
Looking ahead to even more interesting possible analogies with 
Biology are the recent advances in understanding
developmental processes of multicelled animals

These large plateaus for stable structures suggest we take a 
similar and somewhat “theatrical view” of a system in which every 
entity at every level is portrayed by an intelligent actor wearing 
appropriate costumes and simply playing a role. Here we are “not 
multiplying entities unnecessarily”, but are putting the burden on a 
single kind of object (and we hope that it can be explained simply 
enough to make the larger system much easier to understand than 
if it had been built from many thousands of seemingly different entities)

The above section on the analogy with biology (notice the two
references to cells) contrasts rather sharply with the following
view taken in [1] (see the Forward, by Alan J. Perlis, at
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-5.html) (notice
the reference to mechanisms):

Our traffic with the subject matter of this book involves us with three 
foci of phenomena: the human mind, collections of computer 
programs, and the computer. Every computer program is a model, 
hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process. These processes, 
arising from human experience and thought, are huge in number, 
intricate in detail, and at any time only partially understood. They are 
modeled to our permanent satisfaction rarely by our computer programs.
Thus even though our programs are carefully handcrafted discrete 
collections of symbols, mosaics of interlocking functions, they continually 
evolve: we change them as our perception of the model deepens, 
enlarges, generalizes until the model ultimately attains a metastable 
place within still another model with which we struggle. The source of 
the exhilaration associated with computer programming is the continual 
unfolding within the mind and on the computer of mechanisms 
expressed as programs and the explosion of perception they generate. 
If art interprets our dreams, the computer executes them in the guise 
of programs!

Cells versus mechanisms:  This seems to be one essence of the purely
object-oriented vs. Lisp-style methodologies.  So in order to
appreciate Smalltalk (and more generally, purely object-oriented
programming), it seems that one must learn to think of computation in
terms of cells, rather than mechanisms.  Or perhaps even more
generally, one must learn to abandon thinking in terms of computation
entirely, and instead think in terms of selfish genes, a la Dawkins.

 
 Also see the (somewhat long) discussion thread
    http://www.nabble.com/Dynabook-hw-cost-td10732041i20.html

The following portion by Lex Spoon-3 (see
http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Dynabook-hw-cost-p10849141.html) in the
above-mentioned thread in [2] seems particularly relevant:

It would be really neat to have a subset of Squeak that was designed
to be amenable to proof, and then to teach one of the existing proof
systems about this subset.  If you include blocks, but reject
inheritance, 

Re: [Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms

2009-06-29 Thread K. K. Subramaniam
On Monday 29 Jun 2009 3:27:30 pm Benjamin L. Russell wrote:
 Fascinating.  So an object is an abstract representation of a gene,
 rather than a blueprint for a computational process  This is a
 revelation.
In computer terms, Smalltalk is a recursion on the notion of computer itself. 
Instead of dividing computer stuff into things each less strong than the 
whole--like data structures, procedures, and functions which are the usual 
paraphernalia of programming languages--each Smalltalk object is a recursion 
on the entire possibilities of the computer.  Alan Kay
http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_Introduction.html

An image is a like an Internet in a single bag of bits. You have all these 
tiny 'computers' exchanging messages with each other all the time to get 'work 
done'. Once Alan expressed regret for introducing the term 'object-oriented 
programming' because it downplayed the role of messages. Oops :-)!

Subbu
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[Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms

2009-06-28 Thread Benjamin L . Russell
On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:57:49 +0530, K. K. Subramaniam
subb...@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday 26 Jun 2009 2:59:13 am Frank Church wrote:
 Are there any books that cover this area for Smalltalk
Yes. See http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html for an annotated list.

BTW, Smalltalk is a object-based system. An object combines the role of data 
and algorithm into one unit. The computational model is different from that of 
procedural programming. Are you looking for anything specific?

Is there a counterpart to SICP (_Structure and Interpretation of
Computer Programs_; see http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) focusing on
roughly the same topics from a purely object-oriented standpoint, but
using Smalltalk, in particular Squeak, as a means rather than as an
end?

One aspect that I really miss in Squeak is more focus on theory.  It
would be nice if somebody presented a proof of correctness of a purely
object-oriented algorithm that was implementation-independent.

-- Benjamin L. Russell
-- 
Benjamin L. Russell  /   DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com
http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/
Translator/Interpreter / Mobile:  +011 81 80-3603-6725
Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto. 
-- Matsuo Basho^ 

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