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A comment on Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981). Parent comment

Re:Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981) by hota_mazi on Friday February 10, 2017 @01:01AM (#13613557)
> On the other hand, the big idea behind Smalltalk, message passing (i.e. programming with computers rather just the programming of computers), keeps getting recapitulated in various forms such as Ruby, Erlang, Docker,

"Recapitulated"... interesting choice of words.

Yes, this approach keeps being rediscovered, becomes a fad for a bit and then gets forgotten again. And for good reason: it leads to spaghetti designs with a chaos of actors sending and receiving messages to each other as an undebuggable mess.

Plus, it encourages the removal of types in programs.

It's really a poor idea in practice.

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Re:Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981) by jacquesm on Friday February 10, 2017 @11:25AM (#13616519)
Message passing has its place, some of the most impressive software projects ever built use it at their core.

That smalltalk does this at the object level is quite possibly not the most useful thing (though it is interesting), but at other levels in an architecture it can be an extremely powerful tool.

You can make spaghetti designs with any architecture, that's nothing to do with message passing per-se.

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