Dangerous Ideas

Back in April, Alan Kay and Guido von Rossum participated in the Shuttleworth Summit (sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu and space tourism fame). I saw a few blog posts then about cooperation between the Python and Squeak communities since the two were exchanging ideas, including an article on Shuttleworth’s blog. It sounded good, but I wondered if there would be followup. Then I saw this link to a post by Guido on a keynote by Alan at Europython. I love the prospect that the work done with Squeak and kids might be expanded to a bigger audience through Python programmers (there are a lot more Pythonistas these days than Squeakers). Of course, it also occurred to me that what they Guido wrote about Python could be said for Ruby, too. Then I read the comments and saw one from Alan that mentioned both Ruby and Python as targets to broaden the ideas in Squeak and eToys.

I really hope something comes of this. Avi Bryant wrote an article about the advantages of implementing Ruby in a Smalltalk a while ago, and it’s clear that a lot of people are interested in something like this. Squeak has also inspired projects like MetaRuby, an attempt to implement Ruby in Ruby.

It’s ironic: One of the great promises of object-oriented programming was reuse, yet today, Python and Ruby are still converging with ideas that have been in Smalltalk for 25 years. Of course, I can’t wait for it to happen …