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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Text files defended?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Brian Marick defends the use of text files (as opposed to what most Smalltalks do):
Very tangentially, I'm reminded of those who claim that the failure of Lisp and Smalltalk was partly due to their being hermetic - taking all data on their own terms, not the world's. They failed to embrace the string and the regular expression.
Failed to embrace the string? What the heck does that mean? The regular expression? What, you would rather grep for text than uses senders/implementors? This is what I love about the complacent curly brace crowd - the sharp sticks and pointy rocks make them so happy :) But wait - there are wild assertions ahead!
(Not just to pick on Lisp and Smalltalk, two fine languages: how long did it take for a regex class to make it into Java? And a regex class is one significant affordance notch below regexps built into the language.)
All I can say to that is huh? Please explain how having regexp built into the language - i.e., inextensible - is better than having a regexp library which I can extend and modify? This just makes no sense...
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