[Seaside] Gemstone / Magritte

[Lukas Renggli]

> Well, this issue has certainly made me think carefully about introducing
> extension methods and how they're named, for sure.  But I have been
> mentioning it for about 2 years.  Not that it bothers me too much, I
> maintain my local port with #descriptor and happily use #description all
> over my domain classes for a description string.

Exactly, after all it is no big deal. The name of this method is not
particularly important to Magritte, you can answer your descriptions
from whatever method you like ...

> > Magritte did not start as a
> > framework, but evolved from a couple of helper classes in
> > SmallWiki. It is clear that any selector name potentially
> > leads to conflicts. I agree that #descriptor would have been
> > a slightly better, but the fact that I know a couple of
> > packages that implement #descriptor is not really motivating
> > me to make that change.
>
> Understandable, have you considered whether there'd actually be collisions
> with those other packages in actual use?  Glorp and OmniBrowser use it, but
> not in a way that'd collide with Magritte, what other packages do you know
> of?

Personally I've never used #description for anything else, I only
observed later on that other people do. I remember considering
#asDescription, but according to Kent Beck I rejected this conversion
selector because (1) source and destination don't share the same
protocol and (2) there is not only one correct answer.

Magritte initially started in VisualWorks. There the IO accessors, the
StORE source code management and some parts of the wrapper GUI
framework use #descriptor.

> You're right, but they don't always use English idioms.  You're a good
> example, I've tripped over a selector or two of yours before like
> beEphemeral, perfectly valid, but it doesn't feel idiomatic to me, I'd
> expect the average American to say something like beTransient as an opposite
> to bePersistent.  Not a big deal, just an observation.

I got the idea from VisualWorks. They have a class called #Ephemeron there ;-)

> And please, don't take any of this as bitching, I'm not, you're one of my
> favorite programmers.  Much of my current style comes from things I've
> learned reading Seaside and Magritte sources.

No problem, I understand your position.

Lukas

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch