Alan Kay doubtless remembers me as the journalist who game him a lot of
pain in an interview in Paris - sorry Alan, I was young then. Apologies.
Hope I mellowed out, and I did quit that job and go into research.

However, I also interviewed Wirth about the Oberon system, and we had a
long discussion about the necessity of a linker. Oberon, like ST was a
"total environment". My issue with this is that before deploying you need
to be able to "shrink wrap" the functionality so that several branches or
updates of one or several deployed applications and their run-time systems
can coexist in the same user-space.

This is not an academic problem. The current generation of Windows users
has learnt to fear "DLL hell". Furthermore, dependency issues are one of
the more serious causes of grief in the technically sophisticated Linux
community.


So, although obfuscation may be a bit of a red herring, it would seem
there are some serious issues arising in application deployment that are
not immediately obvios to the developers.


BTW, in journalism the food is great, and you do meet lots of interesting
people :)

Edmund