Home Original page

Smalltalk and Python

Quinn Dunkan quinn at dinar.ugcs.caltech.edu
Thu Dec 14 14:59:58 EST 2000 
On 13 Dec 2000 16:16:06 -0500, David Bolen <db3l at fitlinxx.com> wrote:
>Aaron Jon Reichow <reichowa at tcfreenet.org> writes:
>
>> On 13 Dec 2000, Erno Kuusela wrote:
>> 
>> > the thing that struck me as a little foreign was the apparent
>> > isolation of the smalltalk image from the rest of the operating system
>> > and the filesystem. i want to be able to grep code!
>> 
>> While I'm not a proponent of Smalltalk isolationism, grep is a useless
>> tool (more or less), simply an artifact, ye, a symptom of the
>> sickness known as file-based development.
>
>I'm not sure I'd call it a "sickness" since any development model is
>just that - a model - it may be better or worse than some other model,
>but at least for me, a file-based model works well in many cases.
>
>My biggest problem with the integrated models (with database or other
>repository back-ends) tends to be that often they aren't yet fleshed
>out enough, or in many cases flexible enough, to replicate all the
>functionality I can get out of a file based system with a current
>collection of file based tools that have had lots of time to evolve
>for efficiency and flexibility.
>
>With file-based environments, I generally feel safe that if the
>environment itself doesn't support something, there are enough tools
>that understand the back-end repository (e.g., files) that I can get
>what I want even if I have to go outside the integrated system.  That
>may not be possible with a closed back-end repository.

I agree, and the reason I feel safe with a file system is that it's simple
enough that I can actually understand it.

It seems strange to hear of smalltalkers considering the filesystem obsolete,
because, to me, the filesystem is one of the most successful, practical, and
widely used OO systems around.  The original unix idea of "everything in text
files in a hierarchal filesystem" and then "lots of tools to modify text
files" is just simple enough to work for me.

Plan9 goes a long ways with open, close, read, and write, and the way the
whole system fits together feels very OO and "dynamic dispatch" to me.  If
grep is a useless tool, perhaps it's a sign that your (hypothetical "you")
development style is insufficiently file-based :)

I use grep every day.  Searching for text in text is a basic and useful
task... why reinvent it?
More information about the Python-list mailing list