[frou_dh]

There's something I don't understand about the "messaging" metaphor as opposed to the more pedestrian method calling system that most people are used to...

What about private methods? Decently written objects in the wild tend to have some private methods that they call on themselves. The highfalutin metaphor of a message goes out the window there, because it's an individual object doing something to itself, not a communication.

[corysama]

That's true if there is no composition going on within the object. But, once you have a class hierarchy, some mixins, some dependency injection, or some such... you are "privately" talking to parts of yourself that come from elsewhere.

[frou_dh]

But when it's the exact same syntax to call a statically-dispatched method on the current object as it is to send a message to something else, it breaks the illusion of messaging being meaningfully different while writing code.

Whether some actual bonafide communication ends up being done one level removed (e.g. inside such a private method, or chained off of a field access) is immaterial because when appraising the conceptual integrity we cannot continue after seeing a fail.

(edited)