Dear Ralph,
You're searching for a dialogue type which I'm not willing to accept. Not every dialogue is a problem-solving situation. It doesn't matter how to solve something if you're already absolutely convinced there is no problem in what you're using.
When you learn about historical linguistics and language transmition, acquisition and preservation you begin to understand some things which are difficult to link to "Computer Science" subjects, but they are very related. What we're dealing with is a grammaticalization because isn't like if the Smalltalk language doesn't let us build a good solution, is not like the verbal system is incomplete and the tags would represent a perfect universal innate grammar which we must take advantage no matter the cost, it is more like the plantation of a set of new conventions in the form of grammatical devices. Tags are not a radical language shift, but they are a begginning, like every innocent change in our lexicon. I'm wondering what will be our next "cool" notation and I don't know how so many developer's mental grammar shifted to tag-oriented speeching (but I suspect why :).
Do authoritative majority here want to start to promote new syntax for doing things? To how extent this will remain unnoticed? Linguists know that language users allows a certain degree of tolerable intelligibility before moving out to another language community. That happens between generations in natural languages, if language preservation is planned, then the transitional language users will will preserve its identity for most time. In computer languages that could happen rapidly.
The language in Smalltalk is a small language, that is, with a few number of speakers compared with "major" languages, but computer languages are also subjected to pressure from larger languages, and without economic and political influence, like dialects, they tend to dissapear (there is no death of a language, the users just move to another language but revivals almost never happen).
Cheers,
Hernán
2010/5/2 Ralph Johnson johnson@cs.uiuc.edu
I didn't understand Hernan's response. It complained about tags but didn't give any alternatives, and because I couldn't see any alternatives I had no idea what the complaints were about. But Colin's message is much more concrete and provides an easy to understand alternative.
If tags are a way of categorizing methods so that other tools can find them, an alternative is to find them based on their name. The SUnit testrunner will automatically run methods whose name starts with "test" if they are in subclasses of TestCase. When I studied OmniBrowser a year or two ago, I found the way commands were defined to be pretty easy. The main thing making them hard to learn was lack of up-to-date documentation (class comments would be nice!) but commands were one of the easier things to figure out.
Another alternative is to rind them based on the protocol they are in. SUnit tests are almost always in a protocol called "Testing". The TestRunner could have used that instead. The main problem with this is that Monticello uses protocols to specify packaging, though I think that was a bad design decision.
i don't see why method tags are so bad. They will become part of the standard reflective definition of methods. You'll be able to ask a class for all its methods with a particular tag, and you can easily get a collection of all methods in the system with a particular tag by iterating over the classes. To me, this is no different than asking a class for methods whose name starts with "test". Tags are better than depending on names, because when I look at a method with a funny name, I might think that the author did a bad job at naming it and "fix" the name. However, when I see a tag I will know that the author expects that method to be used for a particular purpose, and I will work on learning the purpose. So, I think that method tags communicate better than encoding information in names. To me, it doesn't seem any less object-oriented than encoding info in names. I've been programming in Smalltalk for 25 years, so I think my intuition should count for something.
-Ralph Johnson