[Python-ideas] Message passing syntax for objects

[Mark Janssen]

>> All that is very good analysis.  However, these data types you talk
>> about, I'm gong to argue are explorations from the journey of computer
>> *science* which are suboptimal.
>
> I chose these data types because they were your own example.
>
>> The questions for this data universe can be boiled down to only a few:
>> what event necessitates the object/node creation?  What is the
>> relationship *between* objects?
>
> OK, so "computer science" data types like lists, and integers (as things you can perform both multiplication and addition on), are not fundamental. What is fundamental?
>
> Anyone who knows any mathematical logic can answer this. For example, give me the empty set and a handful of fundamental operations, and I can give you integers (starting with Peano arithmetic) and lists (starting with ordered pairs). Or, give me relations and a handful of fundamental operations. Or…

Yes, but then you're working in the abstraction space I call the
Aperion (after the Greeks), but this is to create a different space,
with a different set of basis.  You're working with lines.  I'm
working with data. This is important if you're going make such
comparisons.

> And this goes back to the same fundamental misconception that I pointed out in the last email, that you skipped over. Smalltalk and Simula, and their descendants, and relational databases, and semantic web initiatives, and so on all have some concept of structure to their messages. This is what allows the same object to do more than one thing.

Well, I'm going to suggest that those initiatives failed because of
their fundamental premise is flawed.

> Finally, if you want to design a whole new language from the ground up,

Whoa whoa -- I'm not trying to design a "whole new language".  I'm
trying to continue the evolution of programming language elegance.
And to me Python is the right direction.

Mark