Fw: Style

Mark Guzdial guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
Mon Jun 21 13:42:12 UTC 1999


A side note to this discussion.  I told my wife, the Java programmer and
OOA/D instructor, about this discussion.  As soon as I described the
original problem of more temporaries in a method than the VM could handle,
she said, "That sounds like a really poorly written method!" And when I
described the discussion of style, her response was, "Of course!  The best
thing that Sun has done for Java has been to provide tons of examples so
that a Java style has been defined."

As noted above in a Java context, I think that Ralph's point goes beyond
Smalltalk.  There are lots of places where English is spoken, but I (a
native speaker of English, well, American) can't understand that English.
Styles impact communicability.

To recognize that style is important is to recognize that code is for
reading and not just for writing.  You can write in any style you want, but
if you want someone else to read your code, you need to work at
communicating in an understandable, which implies "standard," way.  If you
don't want someone else to read your code, there's always Perl...:-)

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list