I would tend to agree. I like the limitations. But, in this case, I 
want to reach everyone, including those that don't want interesting 
challenges for every little thing.

Cheers,

Alan

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At 5:38 PM -0500 3/11/03, Swan, Dean wrote:
>  > -----Original Message-----
>>  From: Alan Kay [mailto:Alan.Kay at squeakland.org]
>>  Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 10:19 AM
>>  To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
>>  Subject: RE: I want to document but I need to learn first!
>
>
>>  So the people who have been very successful at etoys are those that
>>  are comfortable with any limited palette they are given. This has to
>>  be widened before we can declare etoys to be a real release.
>
>Hi Alan,
>
>	You know, this could also be interpreted as a feature rather 
>than a limitation.  It's been my experience that constrained 
>resource environments encourage "better" design.  In an environment 
>where resources are abundant, there tends be little "competitive 
>pressure" in the sense of survival-of-the-fittest type evolutionary 
>pressure, so people may "get the job done", but not necessarily in 
>an elegant or efficient manner.
>
>	I don't think modern systems take up megabytes of memory and 
>millions of lines of code so much because that's what is needed to 
>get the job done as because we can and it's "easy".  It seems that 
>this has actually led to less code re-use, lower quality software, 
>and unmanageable quantities of it. 
>
>	I don't imagine you need much convincing on this point, but I 
>get the impression that this point of view is not widely held.  I 
>just wanted to mention it so you will think as much about what to 
>leave out as about what to add.
>
>	I could site endless examples to support this idea: The Alto 
>and the original 128k Mac come to mind.  I've often felt that the 
>most amazing things are accomplished when resources are very limited 
>and the people doing the work don't know any better.
>
>				-Dean Swan


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