> In many situations using references rather than values makes sense. If I'm loading and manipulating a bunch of sales orders, it makes sense to load each order

> In many situations using references rather than values makes sense. If I'm loading and manipulating a bunch of sales orders, it makes sense to load each order into a single place. If I then need to see if the Alice's latest order is in the next delivery, I can take the memory reference, or identity, of Alice's order and see if that reference is in the list of orders in the delivery. Presumably, an order would consist of much more than a list of items (order #, delivery address, etc.), including a unique one (order #), so comparing by value here would still work? If you're properly building your hierarchies, I'm not sure I see cases where comparing by reference would logically be desirable (of course, in the real world you probably want to still compare by reference in cases where performance might matter, or you're doing lower level work). I guess this isn't disagreeing with the author's main point - that Value Objects are desirable - but pushing it further: Value Objects are desirable the vast majority of the time. The second part, regarding immutability, I'm fully onboard with.