Im talking the fundamental language framework. 'Everything is an object' and method calls are actually message passing are the two reasons that objc and ruby are actually smalltalks.
I’ve tried to explain this before and unless you’re steeped in late binding, encapsulation, and message passing, the details are lost on most people (it seems including modern language designers).
For the GP, in most languages the dot or arrow operator is field access. If that field is a function reference, parenthesis are used to invoke it.
From outside of the object, neither Ruby or Objective-C allow direct access to object fields or functions. The dot operator sends the object a message that be bound to anything, and even rebound at runtime for specific instances. There is no difference between access and property and calling a function - it’s all messages. Smalltalk and Objective-C (before dot operators) don’t even have different syntax for data fields and functions calls. Ruby’s no arg messages are similar.
Most of the time that distinction doesn’t matter. But writing things like wrappers and proxies becomes trivial. A object can forward any message it receives, and if it sees on it wants to intercept, it can do that easily. Most of the time modifying existing programs and frameworks can be as easy as rebinding some logic to something that wasn’t part of the original program.
This comes at the cost of some runtime performance, and possibly some complexity. The elegance outweighs those, imho.
> For a community that prides itself on "one small tool for a specific purpose," people sure like to use VIM for a thousand different purposes by hacking plugins. This used to be derided as the microsoft way decades ago.
I'm not sure that this is the meaning of the slogan. The slogan says that a programmer shouldn't try to make one tool to do all things, not, I think, that users shouldn't be given the freedom to adapt their favorite tool to do all the things that they want to do. (Imagine, for example, if one applied this understanding of the slogan to C, and regretted the thousand and thousand thousand different purposes to which users were putting it!)
As a parent, I would want to know everything about anyone who's going to be around my children in any capacity. That doesn't mean I have a right to it, though.
how else would you interpret admitting you don't think parents should have a right to know the backgrounds of the people with access to their children before making informed decisions on whether or not to allow it?
please, show me your good faith interpretation and i will take back my comment
Why are you saying unbounded when the discussion is about court proceedings and convictions? There is a clear and consistent boundary here, no one is asking for search logs and round the clock surveillance.
what if these “others” voluntarily apply to a position where they have regular contact and help take care of your children? is it ok then to be informed on whether or not they are a convicted child rapist?
> Why are we protecting criminals, just because they are minors? Protect victims, not criminals.
Protect victims and criminals. Protect victims from the harm done to them by criminals, but also protect criminals from excessive, or, as one might say, cruel and unusual punishment. Just because someone has a criminal record doesn't mean that anything that is done to them is fair game. Society can, and should, decide on an appropriate extent of punishment, and not exceed that.
I think the comparison is unfair. Wolfram is endowed with a very generous sense of his own self worth, but, other than the victims of his litigation, I'm not aware that he's hurting anybody.
In my experience, Alpha works very hard to force you into a natural-language syntax that takes away much of the fun of the rule-based aspects of the Wolfram language.
I'm sure you can trace connections, at least in ideas, but I think Ruby is way more Perl-based than Smalltalk-based.
reply