Chapter 1

Antithesis

Telling an Object What to Do

The big idea is "messaging" – that is, what the kernal [sic] of Smalltalk/Squeak is all about (and it's something that was never quite completed in our Xerox PARC phase). The Japanese have a small word – ma – for "that which is in between" – perhaps the nearest English equivalent is "interstitial." The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be.

Alan Kay, (squeak-dev mailing list — http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-October/017019.html)

A huge amount of complexity is wrapped up in that most common of operations: invoking an object's method. In many programming ...

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