[Oberon] BB Kernel Size

[Jack Johnson]

On 1/20/06, Paul Reed <paulreed at paddedcell.com> wrote:
> out with the bathwater again - I think that BB's drift
> towards self-inflicted complexity* is, to say the least,
> disappointing...

No intentional slur on the BB development team, but sometimes I think
the general trend in complexity among nearly all systems comes from
the evolving complexity in object-oriented programming.  We pass
bigger and bigger messages to objects now bigger than entire systems
were previously, meant to interoperate with other objects that haven't
yet been envisioned.  We've been evolving OO techniques to simplify
maintenance or migration or interoperability or any number of things
except the actual software, to the point that "Hello World" in VB
script requires creating and destroying a myriad of general-purpose
objects (both above and below the hood) to convey a simple greeting,
and as I look around the computing spectrum I see the resulting
mindset flourishing.  How else would you add two numbers if not
through the creation and destruction of objects?

And, I can see both sides of the coin.  I can see that XML provides
huge flexibility in the BB interface, and I can also see that XML is
overkill for what it does.

-J