Richard O'Keefe wrote:
On Jul 15, 2009, at 5:25 PM, Benjamin L.Russell wrote:
it interesting that you should use the biological term "disease"; according to a post [1] entitled "Re: Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms," by K. K. Subramaniam, dated "Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:25:34 +0530," on the squeak-beginners mailing list (see http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-June/006270.html),
Concepts in Squeak [a dialect and implementation of Smalltalk] have their origins in biology rather than in computational math....
That posting is wrong.
Smalltalk's roots are very firmly planted in Lisp, with perhaps a touch of Logo (which also had its roots in Lisp). The classic Smalltalk-76 paper even contains a meta-circular interpreter, which I found reminiscent of the old Lisp one. The "biological" metaphor in Smalltalk is actually a SOCIAL metaphor: sending and receiving messages, and a "social" model of agents with memory exchanging messages naturally leads to anthropomorphisms.
Also of note, the social metaphor is also very mathematical. It has its roots in process calculi like the pi-calculus, petri nets, the join-calculus, etc. The "original" OOP metaphor of Agents is also strongly aligned to this process calculus interpretation. (And any anthropologist will defy that sociality has more than a primitive connexion with biological systems. Animal behaviorists may disagree.) -- Live well, ~wren