Re The flexibility fetish
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2004-04-24

On [BileBlog>http://jroller.com/page/fate/20040424#the_flexbility_fetish] today he decided to complain about flexibility, managing to compare it to flaccidity :). But he does have one important quote in there that I find is very apt for Smalltalk.

A wise man once said that a framework's genius lies more in what it does not do, than in what does.

In Smalltalk, flexibility is in everything so long as you don't write any code. The more code you write the less flexible things become. Nearly all the time, you remove code and you get the following results: (a) better factoring, (b) less code (obviously), (c) more flexibility. It's rare you see a Smalltalk project jumping up and down about flexibility, simply because it takes effort to remove the flexibility.