
Ask HN: Smalltalk, Platonic idea world and Giordano Bruno memory techniques - sa_su_ke_75
I have a philosophical question.  i have read design principles behind smalltalk (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.virginia.edu&#x2F;~evans&#x2F;cs655&#x2F;readings&#x2F;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?
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jonjacky
Possibly pertinent: at OOPSLA 2000 there was a paper, "An Aristotlean
understanding of object-oriented programming"

[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=354222.353194](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=354222.353194)

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brudgers
Curious what relationships were noticed.

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sa_su_ke_75
in early history of
smalltalk([http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html](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].

