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<n|phreak>I'm curious, was smalltalk ever a language considered for goblins ?

<n|phreak>The reason why I asked is because of the OOP with objects , since smalltalk is a pure object language.

<dthompson>I don't know if cwebber ever considered it for use as the implementation language, but it's definitely a rich source of ideas/research

<n|phreak>I really like the white paper and explaining in the beginning about security and objects , its really well done.

<dthompson>but also, what smalltalk means by "object" and what the "object" in "object capability" means are two different things

<dthompson>object capabilities != OOP

<n|phreak>That is true , I said that wrong , apologies

<dthompson>oh you said nothing wrong

<dthompson>I'm just trying to explain that the word "object" is one of the most confusing words in computer science

<n|phreak>ha that and cyber

<dthompson>everyone has a different definition of "object"

<dthompson>the phrase "object capability" has the bad side-effect of making anti-OOP predisoposed to dislike them

<n|phreak>security and object capabilities is really cool, I look forward to reading more about it and using that as a pure ACL

<n|phreak>what do you think of the SOLID pod project?

<dthompson>I honestly know very little about solid

<dthompson>what do you mean by "pure acl"?

<dthompson>ocaps are the antithesis of acls, basically

<n|phreak>what I mean , in my own words I guess "pure ACL" is not allowing certain functions interact with a service or a program in the first place

<n|phreak>cutting off access before in the beginning

<dthompson>ah yeah

<dthompson>yeah, not having things allowed implicitly is good

<jfred>there's also newspeak which is explicitly trying to be a smalltalk-inspired ocap language: https://newspeaklanguage.org/

<jfred>I haven't played around with it much but I'd like to at some point

<jfred>(and wonder if a CapTP implementation in Newspeak would be useful)

<jfred>I've daydreamed about a Smalltalk-like graphical environment for Goblins objects though: https://www.terracrypt.net/posts/smalltalk-ocap.html

<jfred>dthompson: OOP certainly means a lot of different things but I do feel like Smalltalk-style message-passing OOP is very similar to object capability programming (or at least, the Goblins version of it)

<dthompson>jfred: there are certainly similarities! not saying there aren't

<dthompson>certainly closer to smalltalk than many other OOP systems

<nixfreak>Thats interesting I've daydreamed about a Smalltalk-like graphical environment for Goblins objects though: https://www.terracrypt.net/posts/smalltalk-ocap.html

<dthompson>yeah it's a neat idea jfred

<dthompson>I have some similar ideas

<jfred>the part that trips me up a bit is like... what does it look like for a goblins object to expose a drawable representation of itself? and how do you do that in a performant way?

<jfred>I feel like there might be some inspiration to gather from smalltalk implementations there

<nixfreak>jfred what implementation of smalltalk do you use?

<nixfreak>I have tried Pharo , gnu smalltalk , but got overwhelmed with pharo , but I reall like cuis

<nixfreak>reall* really

<nixfreak>This is good stuff , http://habitatchronicles.com/2017/05/what-are-capabilities/

<dthompson>yeah that article is great

<dthompson>great blog overall

<nixfreak>hmm, I always wanted to try Genode https://github.com/dckc/awesome-ocap?tab=readme-ov-file

<nixfreak>damnit rabbit hole Genode and SculptOS shit

IRC channel logs

2025-03-20.log