Re: LFM + LFSP = LFE?

[Steve Dekorte <address@hidden>]

On Thursday, June 12, 2003, at 07:04 AM, Stéphane Payrard wrote:
> This story of SmallTalk image seems to me quite backward.  Proposing
> that each person "lives" in his own image or that he is has to accept
> wholesale another image is like proposing an autistic world as a norm
> where granular interaction between people is impossible.

I see it as similar to an OS where your installed libraries and 
applications and the processes running(disk+ram) compose what can be 
thought of as the "image" of your machine.

The two differences I see are:

1. Permissions
Typical OSes tend to look like boxes within boxes, where the smaller 
boxes are somewhat limited in how they effect their owners or 
neighbors, although these protections can be bypassed, they generally 
aren't. For example, a process usually doesn't modify code in another 
process or in the kernel at runtime.

2. Namespaces
Languages such as Lisp and Smalltalk that rely on globals are fragile 
as changes effect the entire system. For example, if you change a 
method of the Integer class in Smalltalk, all code in the system sees 
the change. This can cause problems if you don't maintain all the code 
on the system. An inheritance via delegation model similar to Self or 
NewtonScript's may be a solution.

Also, check points and rollbacks of the entire system don't solve this 
problem as important work might have been done in some other part of 
the system that would be lost in a rollback.

Once these problems are solved, I think the image model may have great 
advantages.

Cheers,
Steve
Io, a small language: http://www.iolanguage.com/