CommonLoops

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>]

I don't see the CommonLoops proposal as trying to be all things to all
people.  The basic CommonLoops langauge, with some of the proposed
extensions, looks to me (as a relative novice in this game) like just
the right level for most of the things I want to do.  It's clean and
easy to understand, and it has the property that you don't run into any
of the complexity until and unless you need it.  The lack of this
property was the biggest problem with Flavors, in my opinion.  I could
easily imagine doing almost all my work in base-level CommonLoops and
using it as the teaching vehicle for students new to Lisp and objects.

If we went mostly with the CommonLoops proposal, then the fact that it
has the hooks to accomodate the existence of other existing paradigms
(or ones as yet uninvented) looks to me like a pure benefit.  I grant
you that if people use the extension hooks to implement a dozen
different object-oriented paradigms, and if these are all in heavy use
by the community at the same time, then we've got a very confusing
situation (though no worse than if there are a dozen completely separate
paradigms implemented by totally separate mechanisms on separate
machines).  But I suspect that very quickly we will see a world in which
most of the community is using basic CommonLoops, a few groups are
sticking with Flavors, and there are one or two small groups
experimenting with new extensions.  That looks to me like about as
monolithic a world as we can hope for in this rather unsettled area, and
achieving that much order would be a big step forward.

-- Scott