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Message from discussion FINALLY: Another language adopts Smalltalk's keyword -syntax
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Stefan Schmiedl  
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 More options Dec 22 2007, 6:01 am
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk, comp.object
From: Stefan Schmiedl <s...@xss.de>
Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 12:01:19 +0100
Local: Sat, Dec 22 2007 6:01 am
Subject: Re: FINALLY: Another language adopts Smalltalk's keyword -syntax
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On Fri, 21 Dec 2007 23:47:42 -0500

Panu <p...@nospam.com> wrote:
> Stefan Schmiedl wrote:

> > And "readable" is what you have learned to read.

> True. But most people on this list learned to
> read natural language first. Most of them probably
> learned to read from left to right. Therefore,
> Smalltalk is more readable for most people.

True. Probably ;>

> So this "everything is relative" argument has a
> misleading flaw. Of course 'easy' means different
> things to different people.  What really matters
> is what is easy for most people.

Really? IMO, what matters is how well the language
maps to the solution you come up for your problems.
If you're having a nice object based representation
of a given task, a language without objects won't
cut it. If you're dealing with a well-defined mathematical
problem, you'll probably not mind being able to define
functions with a fixed number of arguments only.

Parsing input with regular expressions is in many cases
easier to implement than using a "real" parser. And you
won't find things much more unreadable than regexps :-)

> Now, if you invest your time in learning to read
> Lisp (which I've done), the question still remains,
> does it make Lisp more readable to you, than Smalltalk,
> after a similar investment in time to learn it.

Both have simple syntax, for me there's no difference.
What I'm (sometimes) missing in Smalltalk is multiple inheritance,
but I have yet to look at the what and how of Traits.
What I'm missing in Lisp is a little bit of cleaning up
of the historically grown special cases (eg. different
accessor function names vs. different implementations
of the same message).

Dylan was, again IMHO, a step in the right direction, *before*
they decided to drop the Lisp based syntax. It looked and felt
like lisp, only lean and clean.

Merry Christmas,
s.

> -Panu Viljamaa


 
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