This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Seeing (part of) the light
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Daniel Steinberg talks about dynamic changes at runtime as if it's never been done before.
Imagine adding methods and variables to objects at runtime. Seems odd - how do other objects know what methods they can call. Seems scary. Seems kind of cool.
Venners asks Matz about whether Ruby is lest robust because it lacks the static compile-time type checking found in Java and other languages. Matz answers that his goal is to "try to make the interpreter robust, but the language itself in its design does not care about robustness for two reasons. First, you need to test the system anyway to be robust. So we encourage unit testing using a testing framework to help achieve robust systems. The second reason is that programs written in dynamic languages are very easy to run and check."
It's great that Ruby is getting noticed by some of the Java folks; maybe they (and the .NET crowd as well) will start to see the kinds of shackles they are wearing. They should also take a look at Lisp, Smalltalk and Python - and realize that the kind of functionality being discussed in that interview is nothing new
Previous Topic
