(Attention-conservation notice: the penultimate paragraph is most
important.)

Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> Just a meta remark - I find it highly amusing how people dissect the
> Gospel of Alan, even interpreting it literally. He must get quite a
> chuckle from that ;)

Well I hope so! :-)

>From reading the old and new papers out there, and the interviews, and
the new stuff VPRI are up to, I'm getting the impression that it's very
difficult to understand the *subtlety* of the ideas that led to
Smalltalk[1] -- which leads people (like me) to mistakenly concentrate
on the artifacts (i.e. Smalltalk) and their properties, when the
motivation for constructing the artifacts is much more important.

Smalltalk is much more interesting when viewed as almost a throwaway
experiment in realising some of these more abstract background ideas.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the ideas aren't just subtle,
they're also *alien* to the vast majority of programmers out there:
hobbyists, academics, and those in industry alike. Very hard to get
one's head around. (Compare with Dijkstra's opinion of BASIC.)

***** I'd really appreciate an extended essay -- a textbook? a
manifesto? -- from those who properly grok it (i.e. Alan and those at
VPRI), aimed at helping out those who'd like to: a kind of little-step
by little-step introduction to weaning people off their current mindset
and helping them explore the subtleties of the new way of looking at
things. Something akin in spirit, perhaps, to Drexler's Engines of
Creation. *****

It'd be useful not just to me, but for all those I (and no doubt other
readers of this list) run across who can't understand why
Smalltalk-the-artifact is simultaneously a great improvement on its
successors and a system unsuitable for serious use.

Regards,
  Tony

[1] such as, from http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/Kay72a.pdf, the view
of the duality between data and function through the lens of process,
and from the newer VPRI material the "particles and fields" metaphor of
distributed systems.