From: Will Duquette <will@wjduquette.com>
Date: April 27, 2004 8:10:20 PM PDT
To: snit@lists.wjduquette.com
Subject: Snit Reconsidered #1: Object Glue

This is the first in a series of short essays I'm going to be writing
about Snit.  This one is philosophical; the ones that follow will
focus on concrete design and implementation issues leading up to Snit
1.0. 

The primary purpose of Snit is to be "object glue"--to help you
compose diverse objects from diverse sources into types and
megawidgets with clean, convenient interfaces so that you can more
easily build your application.  It's important not to lose sight of
that. 

Snit isn't about theoretical purity or minimalist design; it's about
being able to do powerful things easily and consistently without
having to think about them--so that you can concentrate on building
your application. 

Snit isn't about implementing thousands of nearly identical
carefully-specified lightweight thingamajigs--not as individual Snit
objects.  Traditional Tcl methods will be much faster, and not much
more complicated.  But Snit *is* about implementing a clean interface
to manage a collection of thousands of nearly identical
carefully-specified lightweight thingamajigs (e.g., think of the text
widget and text tags, or the canvas widget and canvas objects).  Snit
lets you hide the details of just how those thingamajigs are
stored--so that you can ignore it, and concentrate on building your
application. 

Snit isn't a way of life, a silver bullet, or the Fountain of
Youth. It's just a way of managing complexity--and of managing some of
the complexity of managing complexity--so that you can concentrate on
building your application. 

Object Glue--that's the thing to keep in mind.  In fact, had I thought
of it at the time, I'd have called Snit "Glue" instead...or perhaps
"Gloo". 

Will

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