Comment by ignitionmonkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignitionmonkey | Hacker News Reader

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I don't see any sentence nor expressiveness in that. It's the same structure as most method calls.

"Deposit 100 dollars in my account." is a sentence, and that's doable in most languages. It just depends on how high you want to go with it. Functions are ubiquitous and powerful:

    deposit($(100), in(my_account))

And if we remove brackets like a lot of languages (I prefer not to)...

    deposit $ 100, in my_account

Functions remove the need to tie actions to objects too. We can rely on types/interfaces.

    deposit($(100), in(the_river))

We could go further, again, depends where you want to stop. Expressiveness isn't really limited by most languages.

Also, reading like a sentence is not expressiveness. Expressiveness in programming languages is about abstractions, like for example macro capabilities. Reading like a sentence is merely about fluent APIs and (sometimes) syntactic sugar.

Best to read the smalltalk as always embedded in an invisible framework that looks like this:

hey OBJECT !, I want you to ACTION with ARGUMENTS

so ... "hey account!, I want you to make a deposit with $100"

...which illustrates one of the oddities of Smalltalk's vision of OOP pretty well. I've made deposits into accounts, or maybe I've asked banks to make a deposit into an account on my behalf, but I've never (intuitively) instructed an account to make a deposit into itself.

level error!

   account deposit: $100

was the message from the bank teller to the account, not from you :)

Do bank tellers, conceptually, think of themselves as telling accounts to add $100 to themselves? Or do they think of themselves as adding $100 to an account?

... when the bank teller's are software-driven entities, they might :)

Yes, I suppose it's the case that if the bank tellers are written in Smalltalk, the Smalltalk way of doing things make sense.

Yeah, you're supposed to say:

    bankTeller deposit: (100 dollars) in: myAccount.

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