It’s also important to realize that Alan Kay’s big idea in Smalltalk wasn’t the objects, it is the messages! Having a flexible messaging syntax is crucial for accessing new capabilities beyond Smalltalk-80’s notions.

It’s 28 years into the invented future (ok 40 if you count from the dyna book) yet much hasn’t changed. We’re still stuck with C based ickiness at the low level and bloated operating systems built upon faulty assumptions of C type safety.

We support people playing with the syntax.

Our view is that one dimensional streams of text symbols for describing programs is primitive and we’d all be better off developing something new. In that regard does syntax matter? Yes, it still does for it gives us access to capabilities that might not otherwise be possible in a one dimensional text stream representation of programs/methods/objects/messages. The key issue (imho) is to not introduce unnecessary syntax, instead reuse existing syntax when and where possible by expanding it’s dynamic range (so to speak). For example, rather than adding the curly braces “{ }” that Squeak has adopted for instantiating arrays of objects ZokuScript reuses Blocks! Reuse re-imagined produces wonders.

We support what Vassili and folks are doing. We can’t wait to play with it. All the best and keep up the excellent work. Keep it simple for power but not simplistic!