Totally agree failure should be announced for another object to observe and decide to do something about. I didn't feel the author got the messaging part. 'You

Totally agree failure should be announced for another object to observe and decide to do something about. I didn't feel the author got the messaging part. 'You send some data to an object' kind of misses the point. Going back to Kay's inspiration in cellular function the messaging is more a broadcast, though proximity matters as far as which other cell responds (Internet routing tables are a good approximation but you need something more dynamic to allow objects to be created and destroyed).