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Discussion on: Semantics, Not Syntax; Developer empowerment using functional-first programming

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aminmansuri profile image
hidden_dude

I still think Smalltalk has most if not all these functional semantics and has a much better syntax. It also was a lot more feature rich.

It seems that people are now getting to the early 70s in language design. Maybe we'll get to the 80s some day and reexamine Smalltalk.

C++ did a lot to confuse people about what OO is and isn't.

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kirkcodes profile image
Kirk Shillingford

I've only ever heard good things about Smalltalk and one of the most prolific F# developers I know cites it as his favourite language and what he considered to be his "preferred flavour of OOP". I'm hoping to do some work with it sometime soon.

Yeah, most of the stuff here isn't new right. We've had lots of the patterns but things fall in and out of vogue. That's why I try not to get too sour (or sweet) on any one thing. I had a bad experience with Java the first time I encountered it but it wouldn't been a mistake to write off all object oriented programming. Haskell too was a struggle initially but there's a balance with,

"A painful implementation doesn't necessarily mean a bad idea."

I'm hoping articles like this get folks to try more new things, and older things.

We should iterate our behaviors like our code, and find what works.

Also, the devs of the 70s and 80s were pretty smart. :D

Thanks for the reply!

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aminmansuri profile image
hidden_dude

One theory is that language innovation basically stopped after about 1980.. I tend to mostly agree with that view. :)

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alrunner4 profile image
Alexander Carter

Smalltalk doesn't have immutable variables, algebraic data types, or type inference, right?

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aminmansuri profile image
hidden_dude

It didn't have type inference for sure, because it was the epitome of dynamic (but strong typing).

It had equivalent ways of doing the other things.

I take a good syntax and feature richness over an overabundance of features any day.