re: the Spoon book

Craig,
Your book looks great and I look forward to reading more of it. I also applaud your choice of target audience; the lay reader/user/programmer. Data processing is essentially simple, the complexity of current SW products are the results of poor development and probably also successful marketing strategies.

I strongly applaud your aim at making a Smalltalk as Smalltalk should have been and hope to be able to add my two bits worth to your effort.

Targeting the lay reader poses makes it hard to discuss the hard parts. I strongly believe that a new departure such as Spoon must be created on a solid foundation. For example in chapter twenty-two: imprinting and modules. Every object has a unique identity. A copy of the object can exist in a remote image. But then there are two distinct objects with the same identity, thus violating the fundamental rule. This rises a number of fundamental problems that need to be studied in depth, otherwise we may be building our edifice on shifting sand.

Another concept that needs to be carefully studied is the notion of a module. I take it it is here a module of objects. There is the Islands in Tweak, but I find this unsatisfactory because it is not well defined IMO.

Another comment.  chapter twenty-three: collaboration: Documentation is a two-edged sword. It is hard to keep it synchronized with a rapidly changing program; it is hard to read and often hard to understand because it is terse and often uses an unfamiliar terminology. I aim at making the code itself more expressive so that it becomes more readable.

Details:

• The document should be dated.
• estimated completion date: 1 June 2007 is somewhat unlikely
• A few figures would have helped me. As it is its target audience are pure left-brainers.
• PDF permits a live TOC, e.g., see
        http://folk.uio.no/trygver/2007/2007.07.30-RolesAndClasses.pdf
  I find this very helpful for navigating in large documents.

-------------------

I hope to get a stable Spoon system up and running so that I can get on with my own work. I may have Spoon running now as an empty window, but I cannot communicate with it in any way.

Cheers
--Trygve

-- 

Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: trygver@...
Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://folk.uio.no/trygver
N-0378 Oslo           Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
Norway 
 

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