[self-interest] Changing prototype chain as state machine

ungar at mac.com ungar at mac.com
Fri Sep 30 19:06:47 UTC 2011


Thanks, Jecel. I did look very quickly at the paper, and I completely agree with all of your comments.
We'll just have to make sure that conferences provide soft foods for the static typing people;-)
Thanks for watching that talk!

- David


On Sep 30, 2011, at 10:50 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:

> David Ungar wrote:
> 
> > Thanks, guys. I'll read the Ego paper.
> 
> I only skimmed through it, but it seems to be another case of "Self as I
> imagine it from reading the papers" instead of "Self as it really is
> from using it". The idea of dynamic inheritance using data parent slots
> is not mentioned at all, but the focus is on using _AddSlots: and
> friends to change objects during an application's execution. It
> certainly would work, but it would also defeat all the optimizations
> built into the VM.
> 
> This style of programming is used a bit in Javascript and the people,
> like Lars, who have recently done high performance implementations of
> that language have had to deal with this problem. So there is not reason
> why a new implementation of Self couldn't handle lots of _AddSlots:, but
> it hasn't been the focus so far.
> 
> In fact, that is also true for dynamic inheritance. If you use
> assignable parent slots then you will take a huge hit in terms of
> performance. When Urs Hölzle was asking for application in Self to test
> the compilers he had created for 3.0 (and which we still use today) I
> sent him my CMOS simulator but it was useless for him exactly because I
> had used dynamic inheritance. In my case it was just a nasty hack to
> make the Self REPL work as a nice command line for my simulator. The one
> example I know of that does use assignable parents as intended is the
> tree objects in collections.
> 
> Given how dynamic inheritance is actually used (to switch among a small
> number of constant objects rather than point to arbitrary ones) I came
> up with an implementation were an object with a dynamic parent would
> have several maps, one for each parent (up to five, for example). When
> you assign to the parent slot, you switch maps as a side effect.
> 
> > A while back I gave a keynote at OOPSLA on the role of paradox in language
> > design.In general, I believe that better type systems are worse--depending
> > on the context. One loses the power of ambiguity. However, if you are
> > sending code to Mars, it's a good tradeoff. Anyway, I'll have to read the paper.
> 
> I watched that talk - you had some static typing people grinding their
> teeth :-) Back in 2003 Java was at its zenith and stuff like Ruby and
> Javascript were still being ignored. By a coincidence, I had started
> using "sending code to Mars" in the mid 1990s as an example were
> traditional software engineering practices would be a good idea in
> contrast to other applications with GUIs where you might get better
> results through exploratory programming (we didn't have the term "agile
> programming" yet, though we already had some of the methods like Scrum).
> 
> -- Jecel
> 
> 

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