J J wrote:
> Perhaps that is the way to go, we'll see, but one must keep in mind that
> there is a slider bar: on one side is "user friendly-ness" and on the
> other side is "security".  The more secure you are, the less user
> friendly.  The more user friendly, the less secure.

I'm not sure it's quite so binary.

There's an idea called "Zooko's Triangle",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko's_triangle, that states that names
can be any *two* of

 - human-meaningful/friendly/memorable
 - decentralised
 - secure/unique

but never all three at once.

The situation we have within a Squeak image today is a *centralised*
human-meaningful unique naming system: classes have unique names in a
central, system-wide directory.

The situation we have within the Squeak community at large is a little
different: a decentralised, human-meaningful, but *non-unique* naming
system, where anybody at all can build their own MyClass, completely
different to everybody else's.

Systems like Craig's naiad, if I understand correctly, are decentralised
and unique, and sacrifice a certain degree of human-meaningfulness. This
strikes me as the way to go, because tools can help bridge the gap to a
system just as easy to use as the current centralised class dictionary.

For an excellent introduction to the idea of "petnames",
locally-meaningful names for securely-unique keys, please see
http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/petnames/IntroPetNames.html

The "examples and near examples" section is particularly interesting -
it's easy to imagine Squeak's tooling slightly refactored to provide
outstanding support for a petname system for classes.

More references:

http://zooko.com/distnames.html
http://shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html

Regards,
  Tony
-- 
 [][][] Tony Garnock-Jones     | Mob: +44 (0)7905 974 211
   [][] LShift Ltd             | Tel: +44 (0)20 7729 7060
 []  [] http://www.lshift.net/ | Email: tonyg at lshift.net