MC in basic

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Tue Dec 14 09:23:20 UTC 2004


> So we have in fact only 1652 -146 = 1506 classes in 3.8gamma
> complexitiy wise.

This is like some governments declaring that people above a certain age 
without a job cannot be unemployed because they must be thought of as being 
in "early retirement" ;-) In short I don't buy it. Since the classes and 
methods appear in the user interface and therefore add to the perceived (and 
real!) complexity of the system. Sure, one would *hope* that they add value 
by documenting behavior but there is a) neither a guarantuee for that and b) 
you would equally hope that all the other classes add value by documentation 
behavior too. And then should we stop counting these too? ;-)

>> So then we put VMMaker, Games, Celeste, Balloon3D,
>> Wonderland, Scamper into packages. Only to replace them with m17n,
>> SqueakMap, SUnit, Tests, (and soon) Monticello in basic.
>>
>
> VMMaker, Games, Celeste, Balloon3D,Wonderland, Scamper are official 
> packages whereas SqueakMap, SUnit, Tests, (and soon) Monticello
> belong to the infrastructure allowing to deal with and load other 
> packages.

So you consider something like 3D support not to be infrastructure. That's a 
very interesting point of view; totally unlike to my own. I would have 
declared all of the basic media capabilities (graphics, sound, 3D) to be 
infrastructure and instead argued that a system can perfectly well run 
without the tests (you can load them if you wish to develop in a particular 
subsystem) or any single source-code management system. To me, programming 
is a particular use of the system not its whole purpose for being - that 
purpose is to be an environment for encountering dynamic media (which may or 
may not include programming activities). But then, maybe I'm the only person 
actually playing the Squeak games, hm? ;-)

Cheers,
  - Andreas




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