From: Alan Kay Alan.Kay@disney.com
Suggestion: turn all the energy worrying about formatting
Smalltalk-80
conventions into good ideas for making real OOP inviting to look
at and we
can make these happen right from the parse tree ....
My idea was to do something like this in small steps. Starting with where we are right now, look at places that are causing problems and change them, always keeping the overall goal in mind. Observe how the change works and repeat as necessary.
However, suggestions of small, incremental changes always seem to elicit *exactly* two reactions. The 'conservatives' complain about any change whatsoever whereas 'progressives' aren't satisfied with so small a change and want to redesign everything, preferably mitching and matching cncepts from as many languages 'du jour' as possible. Even more interesting, the hue and cry from the 'conservatives' seems to be the same for big changes as for small changes, suggesting that few radical changes are actually an effective measure for negative-feedback-minimization.
:-)))
Marcel