[Seaside] A new critical blog discussing Seaside - Comment my blog

[Sebastian Heidbrink]

Hi Stef!
> Just a side remark: seaside code quality is not equal to squeak-one.
> So pay attention not to generalize too fast.
It wasn't my intention to generalize.
I'm no Smalltalk-Guru, but I think that I had very good Smalltalk tutors 
past years. Many advices they gave me can be found in the two books, 
which I always have around me. "Smalltalk with Style" and "Smalltalk 
Patterns"... :-)
I'm an absolute VASmalltalk (Visual Age) Guy and there are some things, 
which I am missing in Squeak. Or let me better say, which I prefer and 
made my first steps in Squeak quite hard. Most important thing was the 
possibility to define methods public and private. That makes life a lot 
easier when it comes to writing core or framework classes, that need to 
be used by others. It helps me a lot to hide class specific coding from 
coding that may be used by others. Newbiees are much faster able to find 
out what the class does or should do. When you start with a basic Squeak 
image you are not really aware of public and private methods...
But that doesn't lead me to blameing all Squeak or especially Seaside to 
be bullsh..... they are different somehow to codings that VW and VA 
users are used to. But the reason of that is the basis.
It is a fact that many squeak codings usually access instance variables 
directly, what makes some coding hard to read and to understand.
It's a fact, that coding conventions are more agressively assured in 
industrial projects, than in open source projects, due to the fact, that 
a lot more people get involved in those projects and those projects may 
be overworked a lot more than commercial, critical applications or 
frameworks.
On the other hand I love to browse Squeak projects just because it is 
often a good way, seeing other coding styles and algorithms, where i can 
teach my self further.
Even in Visual Age there are also a lot of classes, which don't actually 
use accessors. But as Avi mentioned, these codings are mainly old core 
classes and they have their root in early Smalltalk. I have no idea, 
whether these codings are different to late 90'ies coding due to 
performance reasons, or just a different philosophie at that time.
Anyhow, since I am programming Smalltalk, I read a lot discussions about 
which coding style is better and which is not, but I never saw a 
publication which made a performance test on different implementation 
styles.
I guess that one also has to keep in mind, that every SmalltalkVM has 
it's own strength and weakness.
Getting all this together in the SeasideCore might be impossible.
But as far as I know the Seaside Team, they absolutely have an open ear 
for improvements.
Having other ideas/priorities and just limited sparetime for following 
those improvments, is no arrogance.

>
> I know it since we are cleaning squeak in pharo 
> http://www.pharo-project.org
> there is still a lot of work but everyday this is getting better.
> We already have a lot more tests than most of smalltalk distributions. :)
> We will run SmallLint on all our packages... 

 I use pharo and really appreciate your effords!

Sebastian



	
		
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