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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Information loss
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Some image formats are "lossy" - i.e., putting an image in that format can lead to lost information. I'm starting to feel like Java and the CLR are "lossy" with respect to the entire field of software development.
First, there's this post from Roy Osherove. Now, Roy is a good guy - I've had some very pleasant exchanges with him via the comment sections of our blogs. But look at this - in response to a post I made about BottomFeeder plugins:
I wonder how plugins are supported in SmallTalk. What's the Smalltalk equivalant of Reflection, for example? of a DLL? dynamic loading?
Is there an equivalent of reflection.... It's kind of hard to know where to start with that, honestly. The reflection that actually exists in the CLR is a pale reflection of what you get in Smalltalk. I mean, take a look here - that's a paper from OOPSLA '89! I'm not quite sure how you would implement Method Wrappers (the cited page is old, and newer code is already shipped with VisualWorks) in C# or Java. Reflection in Smalltalk is just so much more powerful than what is available in the mainstream languages, but the mainstream languages are so prevalent that it's as if the information has been lost.
Take another example - this post by Victor Ng - he asks which camp is worse, Lisp or Smalltalk:
Which camp is worse? The Smalltalk people or the LISP people? It seems that both those groups just love to say "we did 20 (or 50) years ago"
I suppose it does come off as arrogant and irksome - but it's the simple truth with respect to so many things in software development. Just take a look at one of the big things buzzing around the software world at the moment - self healing systems. In Smalltalk (or Lisp, or other similar systems), new code can be loaded into a running system and override existing methods - or add new methods to existing classes - or add attributes to existing instances - all without having to take the system down or having to worry about the state of objects in memory. Heck, I patch this blog server that way all the time. Lars Bak talked about this in the context of small devices, explaining why Smalltalk was such a better choice - the ability to do on the fly updates.
The dead hand of rigid systems holds the entire industry back. You have to jump through enormous hoops just to accomplish the simplest thing. I'm hardly the only one thinking this - I referred to this essay just the other day. Developers new to Smalltalk tend to pick this up right off
We need to do a better job of explaining this - or else the information loss is just going to continue
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