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by amomchilov 69 days ago
I never understood the appeal of this talking point. It’s just an accounting trick that moves the complexity to the standard library.

For example, SmallTalk is a class based OO system, yet this postcard doesn’t slow you how to create a class.
1 comments
petalmind 69 days ago
Yeah, I was also going to say that conflating trivial syntax and "supremely easy to learn" is a very weak flex.

The first Smalltalk-80 book you randomly find is 560 pages.

Also, there is a weird bargaining with "but not block temporaries" and "not an instance variable". Why not? Half of the postcard is basically empty. Also, "except primitives" — how many primitives are there?

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Smalltalker-80 69 days ago
The appeal of having a very simple, base syntax and almost everything in the library / primitives, would be that code is always easy to read and write, also on the 'reflection' level, where most languages have specific keywords that cannot be used 'first class' with the rest of the language. E.g: Types next to class objects or operator overloading, look at Swift.. (Of course the complexity of a full working system (library) does not disappear in Smalltalk, it's just easier to read and modify. :)
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petalmind 69 days ago
> on the 'reflection' level, where most languages have specific keywords that cannot be used 'first class' with the rest of the language.

In Ruby this is also the other way around, and it's one of my pet peeves.

`Kernel#callcc` looks like a method (arguably, of a special class), yet it's impossible to re-implement directly in the language, as far as I can tell.

Same with `raise`, I keep forgetting that it's not a keyword even.

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decasia 69 days ago
Yeah, I just discovered this and was also amazed.

https://decasia.org/tech/2026/02/raise-not-a-reserved-word.h...

This being said, I don't think there is any requirement technically that every core method can also be re-implemented in Ruby... There are so many methods that are just thin interfaces to something written in C, whether because they are touching VM internals, or for perf reasons, or because they make system calls or call external libraries.

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petalmind 69 days ago
You reimplement `while` in terms of `loop`, but do you know that `loop` is also a method :)
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amomchilov 69 days ago
Next up: “all the characters you need fit on a single keyboard!”
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chihuahua 69 days ago
I hope it's not an APL keyboard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)#/me...

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