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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Extensibility in Languages
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.
Dr. Gregory V. Wilson wants more extensible programming languages, and points to Lisp as an example of one. The Planet Lisp crew picked up on that here. If you read the paper, you'll see that Wilson wants simplicity and extensibility. Well, another possible answer to that is Smalltalk - it's a very simple, very powerful language that lets you "extend the language" in very simple ways - take a look at the implementation of #select: in Collection, and then ponder the fact that you can add your own additions to class Collection as needed. None of these things are going to happen in C# or Java - they are both too rigid. VB has become rigid by forcing it onto the CLR. We need something better, but it's not going to come from the mainstream....
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