Please excuse my intrusion, but since this list seems to have many of the "Smalltalk faithful", I thought somebody might be able to help me run down a reference...
It a recent article "The Most Elegant Scripting Language You'll Probably Never Use":
http://buzz.builder.com/cgi-bin/WebX?14@236.hs95a9MoeFg%5E0@.ee7bc67/0
Dan Shafer wrote:
Those who know me and my programming predilections will hardly bat an eye to find I am not a big fan of Perl for two huge reasons: its lack of object orientation and its sparse (and, for me, unreadable) syntax. As a longtime advocate of object-oriented programming (OOP), and as an early (and still loyal) fan of Smalltalk as the best embodiment of OOP we've seen yet, I have an aversion to unreadable procedural code. One of Smalltalk's earliest pioneers, Adele Goldberg, wrote a wonderful piece in the mid-1980s called, "Programmer as Reader." I have searched the Web and have not located a reference to it, so I can't tell you exactly how to get a copy of it. But her central point was that as programmers, we spend at least as much time reading and understanding code as we do writing code. So, if we put in some extra effort to make our code more readable, we would reap huge benefits.
I am interested in finding a copy of this "Programmer as Reader" article by Adele Goldberg... anybody have any pointers?
Thanks, Bruce