On: What Pythonistas Think of Ruby

[stcredzero]

Smalltalk is even better. Advanced Smalltalk is morphing Smalltalk into a DSL. You can even write your own domain specific if-then-else analogues, and it looks 1st class like the Standard conditional logic. Yet the implementation is just a plain vanilla method.

[gnaritas → stcredzero]

You can't morph Smalltalk into a DSL as Smalltalk itself is nothing but a DSL; syntactically every single control structure is library.

[stcredzero → gnaritas]

I prefer to think of it this way: DSL are syntactic 1st class citizens in Smalltalk. (Not 1st class for optimizations, though)

To say Smalltalk IDS is a bit useless. Sure, if your "domain" is some Turing-complete language.

[gnaritas → stcredzero]

> Sure, if your "domain" is some Turing-complete language.

Which is exactly what Smalltalk is. Pick any other domain, and you can use the same syntactic elements used to build the base language to extend it into that particular domain.

Ruby DSL's control structures tend to look nothing like Ruby the language's control structures; Smalltalk DSL's control structures look exactly like Smalltalk the language's control structures.