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!"

Comments

Interface Neutrality, not Langauge

[DrSkwid]

It's not the language neutrality that's required it's the interfaces that need opening.

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' > /net/tcp/$n/ctl

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.

Let's Make Unix Not Suck

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

better than a new VM

[DrSkwid]

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.

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 /dev/mouse

play some audio

cat audio.pcm > /dev/audio

want to play it on another machine's soundcard ?

import -a machine /dev/audio /n/machine_audio
cat audio.pcm > /n/machine_audio

(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.