Why I like slate.

[Brian T Rice]

On Tue, 6 May 2003, Paul Dufresne wrote:

> I am/was following the TUNES project for a long time. I had also read
> some of the papers written by Luca Cardelli. One of them was suggesting
> that oriented-object programming languages was more expressive than
> functionnal ones. But by oriented-language, he was mentionning that
> prototypes based languages was much more expressive than class-based
> ones. And indeed I intuitively agree.

Well, there are two kinds of expressiveness. Prototypes or object-based
programming is certainly better for bottom-up programming, but functional
programming does help you express the large constraints better. For
example, Slate's polymorphism system of prototypes and multi-dispatch is
the most powerful among object-oriented languages unless you count some
extensions involving CLOS or Cecil (which can be done in other ways we are
considering). Pattern-matching in functional languages is a step up from
that, but it mostly requires changing one's mindset about programming, and
it's harder to do in an OOP-friendly way (again largely a psychology
issue).

> I have seen 'a bit' Smalltalk. Self, was too big, if I remember well,
> for me to download. So I was somehow on stanby, waiting for someone to
> come with a nice Self+Smalltalk like language.

Self is a big monster demo that never would work in the real world. Some
other prototype-based Smalltalks like Cel and Io do better, but don't
implement the same performance features. Strongtalk managed to do it
correctly and in a small footprint, but was also bought by Sun to use the
engineers for Java's HotSpot. So, Slate's an answer to that, hopefully.

> And I know Brian knows well what is going on on many programming
> language, and on the TUNES project, so I expect Slate to be a nice
> little platform.

I study too much. :( Yes, we're hoping to put lots of good design ideas
together correctly. Please let us know if something doesn't make sense, or
what you're interested in for features. There are still many incomplete
libraries in the repository, and many libraries in my local copy which
haven't made it into the repository due to incomplete design.

> But normally, I was/am trying to avoid programming languages unpopular.
> I really believe in the 'Worst is better' philosophy. But I just can't
> stop dreaming of a TUNES like platform!

Well, this is here to develop the run-time idea and the user interface and
some tiny experiments in the libraries.

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
mailto:water at tunes.org
http://tunes.org/~water/