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New S# Language - Smalltalk for .Net
curador writes "In an interview with David Simmons, CTO of SmallScript Corp., we learned about a new .NET language about to debut...." I was surfing around and found this article and had not noticed it on /. yet so start your flame engines please!"
and nothing to get angry about. A small section of world's developers will learn and use it, and the bigger smarter percent will use standardized portable tools. API companies like trolltech and SUNs Java will win in the end. The best and the brightest will continue to use ANSI C '99 with ANSI C++ sparingly.
Microsoft can release RPG.NET, Java.NET Ruby.NET Perl.NET or whatever and it wont do any good to them or their reputation. Theyve already attracted the bottom of the barrel among developers, implied by Bill Goates when he said Microsoft has learned rallying the developer community from Linux. He was bullsh*tting. They havent learned a thing.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
... hee2 is stuck under the bed.
How much does SmallScript have to pay Microsoft for the use of the # in S#? :)
-MT.
I never really "got" Smalltalk but the folks that do love it. One of the cool things about the .NET framework is that being language neutral, your choice of language doesn't have to be based on what toolkits and libraries and whatnot are available to it.
:)
So Smalltalk programmers, through S#, will be able to talk to DirectX or Gtk# or MySQL or whatever without someone having to come up with bindings or libraries or whatever they might otherwise need. Scary.
- Steve
It's not the language neutrality that's required it's the interfaces that need opening.
/net/tcp/$n/ctl
TK & Plan9 get this right by using character and not binary interfaces [Unicode in Plan9s case].
In Plan 9's once you've written a program and exposed it in the Plan 9 way you don't even need libraries & whatnot.
take a look at my IRC bot written in shell script
http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/chugly.rc
making a network connection, pah, who needs a socket library
echo 'connect slashdot.org!80' >
Writing a user level file system to implement such things is a bit more complicated but again, once written *any* program can utilise them with the simple commands we all know and love : echo cat grep ls awk etc. etc.
Here's one I wrote to do google searches
Now every program on my system can do a google search using simple file operations. Even programs compiled *before* I wrote mine, such as awk.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Logo.net
1. Bad signature
2. ?????
3. Profit
http://primates.helixcode.com/~miguel/bongo-bong.h tml
Miguel argues that piping is not a very good compenent model to build applications or systems.
In short:
Binary interfaces can have event interfaces.
Binary interfaces allow for strongly typed return codes, or can throw exceptions.
How do you do things like this with text/piping?
the better I was refering to in my post was speciifally that a new VM is required. Plan9 talks via a published protocol [9p] implementable on any platform. I guess .NET is potentially available everywhere but we know it won't be.
/dev/mouse
/dev/audio
/dev/audio /n/machine_audio /n/machine_audio
You are right that some knowledge is required up front to know what commands to issue.
One of the main advatages is the standardisation.
I presume you already know how to use cat, ls, grep, echo, > | & friends.
The use of familiair tools and a textual interface is to go with the "everything is a file" paradigm.
what to know where the mouse pointer is
%cat
play some audio
cat audio.pcm >
want to play it on another machine's soundcard ?
import -a machine
cat audio.pcm >
(permissions permitting of course)
Plan 9 has more to offer than just a few file semantics.
If you really are interested than a set of papers & all the manual pages are available. Installation is fairly straight-forward [hardware permitting] and there is a VMWare image also available.
Plan 9 isn't trying to be on everyone's desktop, it's more a market of ideas.
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9
I can particularly recommend the plumber. File associations are pretty limiting. Imagine a system where regular expressions and a few shell scripts do the work. I wrote a class browser for my PHP code so that right clicking $foo->bar(); would bring up the definition of ->bar from my PHP source code [which sits on a FreeBSD machine] and it took me about 15 minutes.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This note was originally published at John Munsch weblog on January the 14th.
.NET to fail and fail badly
.NET "rebuttal" that I linked to above, "For non-profit use VS.NET can be had pretty cheaply, especially if you know anyone that is in college somewhere." Pretty cheaply? For a non-profit (that means charities, churches, universities, the hobbiest who is going to give away his work for FREE)... pretty cheaply? Wow. That is well and truly pathetic. To try and justify it, and say, oh well, you can try to scam an educational discount so it won't be so dear, is even more pathetic.
.NET commercials with William H. Gacy telling you how great it is without really ever telling you anything about it? Microsoft doesn't trust .NET to stand on its own technical merits and it knows it may go like cod-liver oil down the gullets of a lot of people who have seen how the company works behind closed doors even if it were the tech shiznit.
.NET just in case there wasn't any grassroots community who actually wanted to do it. Or maybe just in case there was and they couldn't control it.
.NET for other platforms? If those same people were working on giving us new libraries and new tools for an already existing language instead of pouring in the thousands of man hours it's going to take to build a copy of the C# compiler or a .NET version of Ant and JUnit?
Lots of reasons why I want
It's benefits a criminal organization. Not one that's been found guilty of crimes once or maybe twice, but lots and lots of times. Those crimes are many and varied, but here's just a few of them: Stac Electronics v. Microsoft, DOJ v. Microsoft, Sun v. Microsoft.
P.S. If you want to split hairs, Stac v. Microsoft isn't a criminal action, it's doesn't stem from a criminal abuse of their monopoly like the other two cases. Instead it was just a case of a small company being driven out of business by willful patent infringement, theft of trade secrets, etc.
Microsoft isn't just one thing anymore. It's too damn big for that. I'm sure even Bill himself knows better than to think that he truly controls the whole ship because it's become big enough that he can't possibly know all the projects, people, etc. anymore. But even a really large company still has a kind of collective personality that it exudes and a large part of the personality both internal and external to Microsoft for many years now is that of a total control freak.
If they don't own it, if they don't control it, if they didn't create it, if it doesn't have a broad stamp from Microsoft on it, then they don't want it. Sometimes it's sufficient for the thing to merely exist and they'll refuse to acknowledge it, other times they need to actively stamp it out because they can't control it.
When was the last time you can remember Microsoft saying they supported a standard? That is, not something they invented and submitted a RFC for, an actual, take it off the shelf and re-implement it without renaming it or "improving" it so it doesn't work with anybody else standard. C++? Basic? HTML? A video or audio codec? Java? Anything?
I'm sure there's something, somebody will point out their excellent support for TCP/IP or something and I'm sure that's true. But if you were to look at Microsoft as a person in your life, you'd wonder what was wrong with him or her such that so much had to be controlled by that person.
When your business is selling the operating systems that 90+% of everybody uses, software development tools should not be a profit center.
Why should I have to plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a "universal subscription" in order to have access to compilers and basic development information? Sun doesn't have to do that? On this point I'll quote from the
Marketing. Have you been "lucky" enough to catch one of the
So they are going to pull a page out of Intel's bum-bum-buh-bum "Intel Inside" playbook and try to sell the brand like it's sneakers and cola. Trust us, you'll look cool if you use it, and we'll keep hammering the brand on TV so somebody who doesn't have much tech savvy in your organization will ask you if you are using it, or have plans to port to it, or whatever, even if he hasn't got a clue what "it" is in this case.
They don't trust you. They don't like what they can't control and they can't control you. They can try and they always will keep trying but ultimately you are going to see them keep trying to do things and always keep a step towards the door just so they can bolt if they have to. Want to see what I mean? Go visit GotDotNet sometime if you haven't already been there. It's the grassroots community website that Microsoft put up to support
Ever been to SourceForge? Of course you have, everybody has because that's one of the hubs of all open source projects. You can go there and get the source of thousands of cool open source projects and it really serves the community well. There's even hundreds of projects now that list C# among their programming languages. So why did Microsoft feel compelled to create their own GotDotNet Workspaces that is clearly just a ripoff of SourceForge?
A few reasons are fairly clear: First, at many of their workspaces you don't get in unless they know who you are. Ever been stopped at SourceForge and asked for a name and password to look at a project? What about download binaries or source? No? At GotDotNet you will, lots of projects are marked with a lock. Second, forget about all those messy licenses that Microsoft might not approve of, you don't need to worry your little head about BSD vs. GPL vs. LGPL. You've got the one true workspace license that you have to agree to, or else you won't be putting your project there. Lastly, well it's kind of obvious, but it's really all about control isn't it. After all, if you aren't under their thumb, that has to be a bad thing. So a SourceForge that they control is pretty much a requirement, isn't it?
It's a really sad way for a lot of people to waste a whole lot of time rebuilding that which already exists. Wouldn't the whole computing world be a lot better if there wasn't a team of people, maybe a couple of teams of people building complete copies of
In the end, we'll all just be left with another way to do the exact same thing only in a different language. Lord knows the world benefits now from being unable to share media between France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan because we can't all speak the same language. I benefit every day from the fact that I can't read a Japanese manga I might enjoy or understand a TV show from Europe. Once you are done building this tower, go build a few more right beside it using Perl, Python, and Ruby too. They're all trailing behind in certain areas, we need to make sure the same set of stuff is reinvented and rewritten for all of them too.
Seems like an ideological shift to me, more closely related to C++ than to Smalltalk
fp?
Unfortunately, no one can be told what my sig is...
(a cut and paste of a comment from zogger) ..just a thought, but maybe you have misread or misconstrued a lot (not all but a lot) of the anti microsoft and what you see as anti corporate posts on slashdot. What I see more, and I agree with, is that people are anti unethical behavior and criminality, and anti what happens once any entity has a lot of power with little or no check to what they do with that power.
The obvious example, following the main thread focus, on microsft, where millions of people have noted that they did, in fact, abuse their position, that they got to a dominate position via some pretty questionable means, and that their security models combined with this position have put people in the "pretty much stuck" position of spending a lot of money to be abused on an ongoing basis. yes, I am aware of "don't use their stuff", well, this has been answerd over and over again by noting it's pretty hard to not be affected by "their stuff" whether you use it or not, especially if your clients and cuistomers are still using it. Catch 22 there, so we will get past that sticking point, it's been answered. We all use the net, and all of us are affected when a significant size hole appears and gets exploited, and once a pattern of many years time and of noting exactly where those holes appear and exactly who is responsible for them and how much money they continue to make by this inclusion into the internet world of this swiss cheese approach to expensive software, well.... I mean, really.... the sky IS really blue.
As to "corporations", recent revelations over the past couple of years have proven there is a lot of outright lying, obfuscation of finances, over hyping to small investors to shill up stocks worth to absurd and reckless levels-fraud in other words, and so on. It's not a true black and white issue, it's more a pick an example (examples again, say microsoft, enron, etc) and point out data and take it from there, normal empirical analysis. the gestalt is, there sure is a lot of criminality going on, and people are beginning to wonder exactly how widespread this is, after example after example comes to light. It's endemic, and probably epidemic, if you would allow a small amount of anthromorphism to be used to describe it..
Of course this can be called bashing, but to millions of people it's "bashing" based on the reality of an obvious need to bash. Blaming the victims for a crime committed against them is not considered to be an intellectually viable form of expression that is valid, at least not amongst rational civilized people.
Now for me, a regular old 'murican capitalist, and a proponent of self-reliance and independence, and ALSO a proponent of above board rational and ethical business behavior, there are some corps I think do a good job, and others I can see as being..well.. crooks is the word. Serious crooks, crooks who not only need some fines, but some jail time. Want an example? any of the corporations who sold weapons of mass destruction materials to saddam back in the 80's, when he was obviously using them in warfare. any of those corpos officers, chucked in the pokey. the corporations dissolved. Well now, that would sure be an interesting set of bignames now, wouldn't it? I have more examples, that is "enough" for ocnversational purposes. And yes, I could name names, but anyone with google access can find out as well.
And to add to the stewpot in the fines and jail list some of the more bribed politicians who behind the scenes and in collusion with other industry heads (and being conflict of industry heads themselves) and semi-faceless regulatory bureaucrats, who have allowed this sort of behavior to become a lot more of the "norm" then what people are comfortable with. Yep, fines and jail. Yep, their businesses dissolved, as being "not in the public interest". Cross the line, do the time. It's like that for joe little guy, should be the same for frederick fatcat.
I think it's perfectly acceptable to "bash on crooks". I think it's perfectly acceptable to go back to the original founders ideas on state chartered corporations, wherein they were tasked with not only following normal business laws and ethics in order to do their business and accumulate "profits", but they also had an additional duty to be of the public interest and benefit, and if it can be shown a continuuing pattern of unethical behavior, that said corporation should be dissolved, with no thought to whatever "profits" are involved,no more than any petty gangs busting would involve consideration of their "profits", and that officers of said corporation should be brought up on criminal charges, as well as civil charges. No one really much cares what the "financial considerations" are when the local crack house gets taken down, this exact same philosphy should be applied on any scale, because, well, a crime is a crime is a crime. I know as joe littleguy that the system cares not about my profits if I should be convicted of a crime, they are more than happen to seize or incarcerate. It's "funny" to note the regardings these very large enterprises the almost total lack of significant level fines and significant numbers of corporate officers who fail to make it to the pokey once busted and convicted. It isn't the bashers' fault that we notice this, in fact, it's an ethical and moral and common sense stance to take..
This doesn't happen enough to suit my tastes, and I maintain that if it did, we wouldn't be seeing near the bad business that occurs, nor the amount of boom and bust cycles, and practically speaking on a tech oriented forum, the IT and internet world would be more robust, more profitable and not less, and much more secure. That it doesn't happen enough is just obvious-thee is no provision for a "who watches the watchers" in our modern "system". We have a theoretical way to do that, but with the seizure of our governmental system by two for-profit organizations, who operate in a "scratch my back and I'll scratch you'rs" mode, a lot more than what they will admit to, you can see how this system is broken and how abuses will continue. Occassionaly, in order to show they are "doing something", they will "sacrafice one of their own" in order to throw a bone to the "bashers", but it really is more of a busywork facade than any true expression of "cleaning up business and it's partner government".
please excuse remaining typos, spent enough time on this post for now
Oh yeah, sure, you've really eliminated the possibility of error. Why not add every method to the 'null' object while you're about it, then your program could _never_ have null-related bugs!
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Miguel argues that piping is not a very good compenent model to build applications or systems.
Miguel or Dennis Ritchie ?
I think Dennis gets my vote
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The 9p protocol is designed to be simple and robust. No piping required and all the things mentioned are possible.
:
/dev/mouse
/dev/mouse
You did forget something
Binary interfaces cannot be [easily] interpreted by humans.
Which is a curse when you are debugging.
The only real difference between the binary and textual is that binary encoding is unreadable, eveything else is implementation dependent. Binary interfaces in and of themselves don't guarantee events or exceptions.
Which would you rather have
%cat
801 600
or
%cat
^C^U ^BZ
[that was the best I could manage for the binary output i took it from what vi reported, in hex it would be 0x0321 0x0258 and ASCII 0x03, 0x02 & 0x21 are somewhat difficult to represent in HTML]
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter