If your’re interested in post-Smalltalk research, or more specifically the implementation of such technologies then you might be interested in keeping an eye out on the work being done by Ian Piumarta, et al.
Well, the good news is that a wiki has been setup for increased public communication about the project.
You can check it out over at…linky
–Lorenz
After working on the Squeak based Mention prototype for some time now, I’ve come to the conclusion that its finally time to put the prototype to rest. Yes, I realize that it have never actually worked yet, but the truth is, Squeak still lacks significant services for language research and development.
The final nail in this case, goes out to the Transcript window, now defunct for god knows why. I actually considered attempting to find a fix for it, or even fixing it myself, and then I realized the obvious. I don’t like Squeak. Its always flakey, or broken, or difficult, or anything but genuinely useful!
I’m sure there are plenty of things it does well if you’re interested in Seaside, but I’m not.
Then I considered the last language I was working on (a concept Lisp that was intended to integrate newer Object-Oriented ideas like Traits). The interesting thing about Lisp is that it handles the Virtual Machine work like there’s no tomorrow. Its also simpler and console based, and you can generate lambdas without even really thinking twice. Hugely important if you want to quickly prototype some high level stuff, that also needs to run reasonably efficiently (not stuff that’s directly part of the language, but rather the VM’s implementation itself).
So, I’ve decided to finally get around to learning the thinking mans Lisp, Scheme. Scheme may not be massively different from other Lisps (i.e. Common Lisp), but it does tend to do things in a somewhat more straightforward fashion. The biggest example I can think of is that it is a Lisp-1 language, which means that there is only one namespace. This is a big plus in my book, for languages that do not provide separate syntaxes for selectors and variables. Mention of course has two namespaces, due to the selector syntax involved in sending messages. On the other hand, selectors in Mention and Smalltalks in general do not always correspond to the same function object.
If all goes well, I should get started writing actual code within a couple of weeks, with a reasonable understanding of Scheme. Since I already know a reasonable amount of Common Lisp I don’t believe it will take too long to learn, but you never really know with close cousins in the languages world.
I would also like to take the time to note that I’ll be developing a reworking of the OMeta parsing architecture for PLT-Scheme (or some other dialect if I swap away from PLT, but that seems unlikely). This parser framework is called MMeta, as I’ve probably mentioned (no pun intended) before, and will serve as the basis for the compiler and parser used throughout the Mention implementation and within the implementation. The PLT-Scheme variation of the actual parsing code (and the S-Expression support), will be referred to as MMeta-L (for Lisp).
– Lorenz