There were two things I really enjoyed about this book. The first was the discussion of different schools of thought in philosophy and how those ideas appear in software. The second was the history sidebars that introduced different computer scientists and explained their contributions to the field.

The basic thrust of the book was simply that you should write your applications as a a bunch of objects whose intercommunication results in the emergent behavior of your application. And further, that your models should attempt to model the real world objects and concepts of your domain.

That's great and all, but the book provides no examples. None. And it makes a huge number of assertions about how much better this approach is and how everything else is inferior, but with nothing to back those statements up. Nothing.

So in the end, I'm left feeling like there are probably some good ideas in there, but I'm totally unconvinced that the author has ever written a real business application. And further, I think he might be just a grumpy old dude who's sad that Small Talk lost out to more mature and practical languages like C++ and Java.