I came across a Sanskrit term, "darshan", meaning sight/seeing, used in Hindu theology, that seeing a deity, *and being seen in return*, completes a human sense of self/being. I'm ad libbing here. So thx, Richard, for the nod (and do desist continuing to feed the animals) :-! "We don't slavishly or dogmatically mimic nature when we design objects, but we do attempt to clearly and cleanly separate responsibilities much as nature does. There are many guidelines, heuristics, and practices we employ to achieve good robust designs. Using analogues to real-world things helps make them familiar and innately understandable." ahhh, that reminded me -- in recent video-watching I learn Alan Kay started out (?) w/ a degree in molecular (?) biology. for me that made many things fall into place. (aside: turns out bruce lee was a bona fide philosophy major in college; had me put a lot of HIS quips in context, rather than, shame on me, eyeroll and snort) which is still not to say i hold nature's-way sacrosanct. while kay says in that clip above that one shouldn't subdivide a computer into "something less than a computer" (e.g. not separate data from action) i could make just as emphatic arguments to the contrary: that it's fabulously elegant to represent the world-as-data, who cares it's not "natural", and to have orthogonal actions mutate that into another state. kinda like the functional folk. except for the mutate part :-/ anyway, i'm here to educate myself. what draws me to learn as i can of smalltalk, aside from it being the flagship of the objects-all-the-way weltanschauung, is because I have a toy app that could benefit from a more expressive language. it reads/writes a client-server database, reads/writes sockets to manage open-vpn, reads/writes to external REST apis, edits images, munges text files, fetches/parses web pages, automates chrome to navigate to and interact w/ other sites and web pages, and prolly a few more mundane things i'm forgetting. i wrote it in Excel/VBA for that environment's "non-serious" and for me recreational aspect, no-(explicit)-compile dev cycle, capable-enough language and, mostly, forgiving and excellent ide. smalltalk/pharo is that times 10, plus reduced application code due language facilities, dynamic code generation and loading (possible in vba, but laborious), additional language expressiveness. all of which can be done in, say, javascript but i quail at the lack of typing for programming-in-the-large, I'm yet to find a debug-edit-continue experience a la vba (which is still leagues behind that of smalltalk), and i wouldn't be learning anything new currently that app is structured as a main-like entry point with, subsequently, a few "smart" objects pushing and pulling many other much dumber ones. i hope to be self-aware enough not simply to recast that in smalltalk but it remains to be seen how tractable i am to education :-/ -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html