[DUG] Compnent creation question

[Paul Heinz]

Neven wrote: 

> Worth a crack though, Bristol! you have a good memory (or I make an 
> impression)

A bit of both really. People tell me I have a strong but quirky memory
for remembering piles of semi-random trivia that I read once somewhere.
Your mileage may very. Offer may not be valid in your state. Some
assembly required.

And yes, you are the sort of person who makes an impression. And you're
plenty smart enough to know that. No need to be coy :-) I'd venture the
more interesting question is more what _kind_ of impression that tends
to be :-)

> Re the VCL, I remeber talking to someone years ago who told me it was 
> orinally boosted from a
> smalltalk library, can't recall who the original author was

Interesting. I wonder if it was Morphic? It may well have been the
inspiration.

But the VCL it's miles away in spirit/implementation/design since the
Smalltalk idea is about being wholely self-hosting (well, barring a
Bitblt primitive or two between friends), definitely no surfacing
non-smalltalk badly written crap into the virgin one-true object model.

That way lies madness! Smalltalkers don't let other smalltalkers depend
on leaky abstractions. That's a 'floater in the pool' level of smalltalk
etiquette breech.

Smalltalk (and moreso LISP) are the two uncredited unappreciated mother
languages. That's why all those guys are so smug now. They really were
right and really did have fully OO, functional, concurrent environments
in the 70s. We'd solved how to do multicore back then. They were just
ignored - "one CPU (thread) will be enough for everyone". Just design
against the CPU mental model - ie.. assembler in drag.

'We've added the necessary explicit lock checks to make it threadsafe
and parallelisable' is like 'The cheque is in the mail' but with less
cheques.

Fortran, Algol, Java, C, C++, Delphi - same pig, just differing amounts
of squiggly bracket lipstick.

For a look at something way cool, have a look at the Sun project for the
Lively Kernel if you haven't already. That's a truly Smalltalk inspired
approach to fixing the utterly broken Web 2.0 application model. And
then some.

I'll leave out the obscure 'Young Ones' in-joke. I probably already
making a bad impression :-)

TTFN,
  Paul.