[via HREF Considered Harmful ]:

Best quote I've heard from a Seattle Mind Camp roundup:

my favorite was from Ryan Davis, giving a presentation on Rails, who said something like

I defy anyone to come up here and use any other framework to duplicate what we’re doing in Rails as quickly. Except Avi.

From the "I did not know that" department:

PJE introduced me to the Value Model pattern that originated in Smalltalk. In case you didn't know about it, here are two references that you can use to learn about the pattern. When I Googled up the papers and saw that the best reference was the article on the c2 wiki, I was going to grumble about the Smalltalk people inventing something interesting but burying information about it. Then I walked over to my (large) pile of unread books and picked up Pattern Languages of Program Design (Pattern Languages of Program Design) (the first volume of the Patterns conference proceedings), and sure enough, there's the same article that appears on the c2 wiki.

James Robertson, you can stop snickering at all us uneducated people now ;-)

Also, here's one of his talks about Lisp and the ideas of Doug Englebart.

• I should have realized that I linked Avi Bryant twice, because I did look at the Elide site before I posted, and I actually had read the Elide paper -- I almost commented on it, but Avi's explanation of his work is what I got out of the paper, so that's fine.

  What was more interesting to me was this post to ruby-talk where he said:

  I believe that the only way Ruby will ever be able to have the same level of tool support (of any kind, whether we're talking about code browsers, refactoring tools, or version control systems) that Smalltalk does is by making the same sacrifice that Smalltalk did: to completely avoid any form of code generation or macros. It's not an easy sacrifice to make - as someone used to Lisp, I found it very hard to come to terms with - but as long as the language is dynamic enough in other ways, I'm beginning to think it's worth making.

  My question is, are you saying it's impossible to do good tool support in the face of macros, or is it hard?
• In another post, Avi pointed to monotone, another candidate for a version control system. I need to take a deeper look when I have some more time.

• Richard Demers and Chris Double had more to say about exceptions. Richard quoted Kent Beck:

  When you use exception handling, you have to think like the writer of a new programming language, not just an application developer.

  But we are creating languages when we develop OOP systems....

  Chris talked about some ways hes used resumable exceptions.