Ask HN: Smalltalk, Platonic idea world and Giordano Bruno memory techniques
I have a philosophical question. i have read design principles behind smalltalk (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html) and i have notice many relation with platonic idea world of Platone and after Plotino, and also the art of memory of Giordano Bruno. Someone know if smalltalk has been influenced also from this idea? Possibly pertinent: at OOPSLA 2000 there was a paper, "An Aristotlean understanding of object-oriented programming" Curious what relationships were noticed. in early history of smalltalk(http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html) i have found this: Smalltalk’s design–and existence–is due to the insight that everything we can describe can be represented by the recursive composition of a single kind of behavioral building block that hides its combination of state and process inside itself and can be dealt with only through the exchange of messages. Philosophically, Smalltalk’s objects have much in common with the monads of Leibniz and the notions of 20th century physics and biology. Its way of making objects is quite Platonic in that some of them act as idealisations of concepts–Ideas–from which manifestations can be created. That the Ideas are themselves manifestations (of the Idea-Idea) and that the Idea-Idea is a-kind-of Manifestation-Idea–which is a-kind-of itself, so that the system is completely self-describing– would have been appreciated by Plato as an extremely practical joke [Plato]. the smalltalk image as a rappresentation of human mind.
the objects as a rappresentation of idea in the human mind.
and classes as classification and abstraction of this idea. Giordano Bruno say that memory is the reflex of the universe. like if symbols are a index of the real world, with sub index and sub-sub-index.... and more the symbols is abstracted then more is represented in mathematical and geometry forms.