Avi Bryant wrote:
On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 11:00:49 -0800, Tim Rowledge tim@sumeru.stanford.edu wrote:
Flow is A Good Thing. As always, the hard part is persuading a large group of people to adopt something new, especially since it is a replacement not an add on..
....
the way to get people to adopt Flow is to make it possible for them to use it side by side with the existing streams, so that they can migrate to it incrementally without anything needing to be broken during the process.
All this means, I think, is prefixing Flow's classes so that they can coexist in the image with the old Stream implementation.
Yes, there's something aesthetically unpleasing about having FlowStream or FStream instead of just Stream, but if adoption is actually a goal it seems a small price to pay.
Avi
I fully agree (100%). If Flow would be available as a package on SqueakMap compatible with 3.8 (with the class names prefixed) I would start using it right away. And my old code would still work. As I gain confidence in the New File System I can port the code gradually.
When Craig first released it in 1998 I was not in a position to choose without the risk of having porting issues every time a new version of Squeak comes out.
Today with a package system in place it is up to the individual developer to choose if he wants to use a package to build on or not. Of course this depends on the level of confidence that versions will be maintainded to be compatible with future Squeak core releases.
Hannes