> The principle of good design can be restated for languages: > Uniform Metaphor: A language should be designed around a powerful metaphor that can be uniformly applied in all areas. A key statement for our budding language designers on HN. However they do go on to state that LISP is about linked structures, and APL is about arrays, which is wrong really - or at least does not do full justice to the ideas behind both…
I found that message passing is an elegant approach to have interoperability on a very basic level. But when protocols and interactions between objects get more complex, it becomes more difficult retain control and comprehension of the evolving system, thus fundamentally better approaches and methods are needed than what is present in a typical Smalltalk system.
You might be interested in watching Alan Kay's seminar on object-oriented programming, in which he sketches some ideas on how to modularize an OO system, notably, using a kind of specification language to describe the functions/needs of components and letting the underlying system figure out how to hook them up and deliver messages automatically (as opposed to the direct message passing style in traditional Smalltalks). The relevant part can be found here [1], but I found the entire talk worth watching, since a whole set of issues with OOP and Smalltalk (difficulties in finding and reusing components, weak generality) is being touched upon.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of the critical ideas have been crystallized into a new kind of Smalltalk - which would be more focused on working on sets of components instead of individual objects/classes (or paraphrasing Alan Kay, making "tissues").