Wes Maldonado: Data Junkie

I have been pairing with a very smart fellow that is constantly driving me mad with talk about Smalltalk.

I hope to fully understand this quote from An Early History of Smalltalk:

Smalltalk’s design–and existence–is due to the insight that everything we can describe can be represented by the recursive composition of a single kind of behavioral building block that hides its combination of state and process inside itself and can be dealt with only through the exchange of messages.

Here are a few other portions that really stood out for me in this paper:

The most important parts of LISP aren’t functional.

The biggest hit for me while at SAIL in late ‘69 was to really understand LISP. Of course, every student knew about car, cdr, and cons, but Utah was impoverished in that no one there used LISP and hence, no one had penetrated the mysteries of eval and apply.

… (LISP) was supposed to be based on functions, but its most important components—such as lambda expressions quotes, and conds–were not functions at all, and instead are called special forms.

There is always a Fizz Buzz

The problem was: given a list of items, produce a list consisting of all of the odd indexed items followed by all of the even indexed items. … Watching a famous guy much smarter than I struggle for more than 30 minutes to not quite solve the problem his way (there was a bug) made quite an impression. It brought home to me once again that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” I wasn’t smarter but I had a much better internal thinking tool to amplify my abilities. This incident and others like it made paramount that any tool for children should have great thinking patterns and deep beauty “built-in.”

There is a business to be run.

And what’s really great about this is that it only has a 20% chance of success. We’re taking risk just like you asked us to!” He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Boy, that’s great, but just make sure it works.” This was a typical executive notion about risk. He wanted us to be in the “20%” one hundred percent of the time.

Embrace small victories.

It evaluated 3 + 4 = 7 very s l o w l y (it was “glacial”, as Butler liked to say) but the answer always came out 7. Well, there was nothing to do but keep going.

Everyone loves shiny things.

Smalltalk-72 objects are “shiny” and impervious to attack.