Martin Drautzburg <martin.drautzburg at web.de> wrote:
> Thank you for your reply and to Bob Arning for his words: "It may not
You are welcome!

> be much consolation, but explorers rarely have the benefit of paved
> roads."
> 
> > One of the basic ideas behind OOP in general and Smalltalk/Self in
> > particular is (IMHO) that there is great power in "mirroring the real
> > world" when designing software. In short - the less we need to transform
> > our model (which typically is out there in the real world) when we try
> > to build software for it, the better.
> 
> -- I might be getting philosophical here:-- 
>         I doubt that the world is made out of tangible things
>         ("Gegenstände" in German). At least not the interesting parts
>         of it. If you look at the postings here (interesting part of
>         the world) you'll see that we talk about things like
>         "explorers", "roads" (both ment figuratively), "ideas", "OOP",
>         "power","mirroring", "software" and other abstract things,
>         none of which have an obvious visual translation. We can only
>         do this because we use *language* and not a point-and-click
>         paradigm. This is why I am not too excieted about "visual
>         programming".

I am not too excited about "visual programming" either, but I don't
think that Morphic, OOP or Smalltalk in general has anything to do with
visual programming. eToys - yes, Morphic - not necessarily.

I was defending OOP and "tangible objects" (when applied to UI objects
of course), not VP.

[SNIP]
> I don't think that OO as such is the problem when entering the squeak
> world. There is an initial hickup but *that* road is well paved. I got
> the blue book and it answers most syntcatical questions. The problem
> is the big big squeak system.

Yep. Agree. Hopefully modules will clean things up a bit in the long
run! :-) 

regards, Göran