[protomyth]

About 4 years ago, I needed a car to drive into the ground that got good gas mileage. I got a pretty good deal on a Kia Rio and I drove it 100 miles a day and it was good on gas and low maintenance. It is just me, so room wasn't an issue.

I suppose I could have bought a Cadillac Escalade and spent a lot more on gas and maintenance while being able to haul a lot of people which would of never happened. It also would have cost quite a bit more than my Rio.

So, its not absurd to buy a Kia if it meets your needs instead of an Escalade, quite the opposite in fact. Just as it is really foolish to use CORBA when all you really need are the facilities already included with most Smalltalks. Just because I'm doing communications doesn't mean I need the big, expensive solution.

[cmeiklejohn]

Agreed, and that's why Distributed Erlang works the way it does.

However, it's unfair to criticize CORBA for one of it's design tenets. It was designed for interop, hence the name.

Many solutions for transparent distribution were around the same time as Smalltalk. Look at systems like Eden, Emerald, etc.

[protomyth]

I think its totally fair to criticize something, especially if it is part of its design tenets. Just because they designed it for interop doesn't mean I cannot evaluate it for the situation I am in. I've never been one for programming dogma. If I was using NeXTSTEP only at the time, CORBA would never have come up because of PDO.