Newsgroups: alt.magick

I had a question about the Smalltalk Blue Book, and I appreciate it was an
obscure throwaway remark, so I'll try to explain why it has its place in
my library of sacred magical texts (along with Misner, Thorne and Wheeler's
`Gravitation' ;-)

I am being perfectly serious for a change, which is the worst possible omen.

Most of my magical training was structured around a diagram called "The Tree
of Life". There are many ways of looking at and using this diagram, but
a lot of people see it as an attempt to represent the steps between the
unimaginable root of all being, and the real world (whatever that is). This is
an old problem, relating to the neoplatonic 'great chain of being' - how
do you get from `God' to this imperfect world.

In the case of Kabbalah the answer is given in terms of 'form'; `God' cannot
be constrained in any way, and so is formless, while the real world behaves
in a very mechnical and predictable way (even in quantum mechanics, to 
forestall the inevitable response) and so must be heavily constrained. It
is possible to imagine an abstraction called `form' which starts off as
the merest germ in the unimaginable root of all being, and `increases' as
you move down the lightning flash on the Tree. I've tried to explain this
in my Notes, so I won't labour the point here.

The Smalltalk Blue Book is a book about programming, and it contains the
definition of an object-oriented programming language called Smalltalk. 
Smalltalk wasn't the first object-oriented language (I believe the honours
go to Simula) but it has probably been the most influential in changing
peoples' perceptions about programming, and creating converts to object
orientation.

Smalltalk asks the question "how do you say what a thing is?". How is a thing
defined by its behaviour? If you have two things (or objects), how can
you say if they are the same? Can you relate the behaviours of one object
to the behaviours of another object? And lots of other really hard questions
which the authors proceed to answer in the context of a programming language.

In Smalltalk there is a root object which has the minimum of constraints and
behaviours, and there is something called the class hierarchy, which
corresponds closely to the "great chain of being". You can see the idea of
form being developed explicitly as an object class inherits behaviours
from its parent class and adds new behaviours to create a new class. You
can look at the Smalltalk class hierarchy, which is like a zoologist's
picture of the evolution of life out of the briny deeps, and trace each
step in the evolution of form. Smalltalk makes clear the distinction between
the class of an object (its abstract behaviour) and an instantiation of
an object, things you can manipulate with a mouse. It works; out
of a germ of form they have developed a rich and complex world of interacting
objects, and you can sit and play with a Smalltalk system with the 
awareness that there is what is essentially an unseen neoplatonic or 
kabbalistic scheme underpinning the whole thing. To me it helps to validate
some of the archaic metaphysics underpinning Kabbalah, and I am astonished
at the similarities I find between the Tree of Life as a representation
of the creation of reality, and the ideas behind the Smalltalk system, and
the fact that I can interact with and program the Smalltalk reality gives
me a clue that the Kabbalistic model may have some substance in it.

Anyway, I have flogged this horse enough. Smalltalk and Kabbalah have become
inextricably mixed up in my head, and I can't program a Smalltalk system
without a wide-eyed sense of wonder. I can't think about a reference-counting
garbage collector without a vision of death on a pale horse. Or Samael.

Colin.