"If you haven't heard of F-Script you really should take a look at it as it can help you in many situations. I must admit I haven't been using it for long, but already what I've seen has impressed me. I was introduced to F-Script at WWDC 06 and thought it was something interesting but didn't pick it up till about a month ago."
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Member since:2006-09-21
I don't think that many people would claim that F-Script is a new language. Rather, it takes advantage of the internals of Mac OS X to finally deliver ideas from the 1980s into a contemporary desktop OS.
And yes, you can do some amazing stuff in Mac OS X with F-Script. It is also a fine way to determine how the object model in Mac OS X works without burdening yourself with recreating "Hello World" for the 2^128th time or "Currency Converter" for the 2^32nd time. Exploration and creativity are far better ways to learn in my humble opinion.
Member since:2006-04-05
"I don't think that many people would claim that F-Script is a new language. Rather, it takes advantage of the internals of Mac OS X to finally deliver ideas from the 1980s into a contemporary desktop OS."
Yay, I kind of sensed you got me wrong. I'm not dissing F-Script; on the very contrary, any attempt to revive the power, flexibility and sanity of Smalltalk (and Lisp for the matter) has my full support. As do anything that tries to actually improve those ideas (like Self attempted to improve upon Smalltalk, for example) or make them somewhat more accessible or narrow the gap between established, status quo programming languages, and great ideas pioneered early in computer science research but only recently became viable enough for "mass consumption" (like how Dylan tried to dress Lisp in a Pascal-like syntax).
The contemporary desktop is the perfect place to really untap the dynamism and flexibility of those ideas pioneered early in the game but which fell in the oblivion because they incurred in very significant performance hit on the hardware then available. I bet my buttocks that the overhead of Smalltalk or Lisp is not more significant than that of .Net or Java when combined with the same techniques that were greatly developed in more recent times on both software and hardware (like JIT recompilation, OOO/speculative execution, and plain jane compiler optimization).
To me, it feels like cleaning up the mold on a forgotten petri dish and finding penicillin by accident. Or treating a disease with some ancient Native medicine, instead of ultra-modern and overdeveloped drugs, and actually feeling much, much better.
Merry go round, indeed. Got it? 
Member since:2006-01-03
Member since:
2006-04-05
Ain't no stoppin', you got the control
Hold on tight and don't you ever look down
Sometimes life is like a merry go round"
I can almost hear the PARC team singing...
Funny how every "new" language invented nowadays sends us back a little closer to either 1958 (Lisp) or 1980 (Smalltalk-80).
Edit: typo. Always check your prepositions, baby!
Edited 2007-02-25 22:53