BioInformatics

[RobertShiplett]

A Smalltalk framework for BioInformatics has just be released by its author in Argentina.

What I thought noteworthy was that he does not claim to compete with BioRuby or BioPerl.

It was a reminder to me that his work in Pharo Smalltalk would bit have occurred if the parent dialect, Squeak Smalltalk, had been a proprietary language of Apple.

While Java has moved to Oracle from Sun, Sun has released Self (the post-Smalltalk predecessor of JavaScript) and work proceeds on LivelyKernel as a result. StrongTalk has been less fortunate and appears not to have a niche in which to thrive.

Suppose that there should be no curl10 for a Version 9.0 of Curl: what has been achieved in this language in macros, in mixins - in so many, many areas from parser and AST to libraries and extensions to packages - all of this is too important not to have a future plan for the future that cannot be foreseen (true foresight.)

The authors of Squeak while at Apple could not have foreseen the recent developments in the VM which have been made available by their new and innovative corporate author. They could not have foreseen the evolution of Smalltalk pragmas as method annotations. Some very simple extensions to Smalltalk gave rise to the Seaside web framework (similar features had been dropped prior to Smalltalk-80 ? )

Languages evolve. The ICON language is now evolving as both Object Icon and as UNICON. Curl deserves to be part of such an environment of diversity preserved so as to ensure that change is not impeded where it cannot be foreseen and so, has not been foreseen.