[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago

[Benjamin L.Russell]

On Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:38:14 +1200, "Richard O'Keefe"
<ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:

>
>On Jul 15, 2009, at 5:25 PM, Benjamin L.Russell wrote:
>> it interesting that you should use the biological term "disease";
>> according to a post [1] entitled "Re: Re: Smalltalk Data Structures
>> and Algorithms," by K. K. Subramaniam, dated "Mon, 29 Jun 2009
>> 11:25:34 +0530," on the squeak-beginners mailing list (see
>> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-June/006270.html) 
>> ,
>>> 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....

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".

-- Benjamin L. Russell

[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>.
-- 
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