Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On Sat, 23 Nov 2024 01:08:16 +0000, Pancho wrote:

On 11/23/24 00:44, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

>
On Fri, 22 Nov 2024 23:07:19 +0000, Pancho wrote:
 

I learnt Smalltalk before I learnt C.

 
Smalltalk is an interesting language. But I think it’s considered a
little too unconventional these days ...
 
Does it do multiple inheritance? I can’t remember.

 
No, not that I remember. Classes, Metaclasses, Single inheritance, very
clean.

“Metaclasses” were just a bit of a hack to implement what Python would
call “classmethods”. Python also has “metaclasses”, in the sense that
classes, being first-class objects, must be instances of something -- and
that something is the metaclass.

Not sure if any other language has that meaning for “metaclass”.

I think Smalltalk was more a teaching tool rather than anything
people used commercially.

I’m pretty sure it has been used commercially, back in the 1980s or
so, maybe even the 1990s. I found a mention of a game framework
originally written in Squeak
<https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/23/croquet_for_unity/>, though
the main news in the article is that it had been reworked in ... wait
for it ... JavaScript.