How to improve Squeak
stéphane ducasse
ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sun Jul 11 09:55:56 UTC 2004
Hi all
the last two/three days I have been browsing a lot of code while mainly
playing with BookMorph.
And I noticed a lot of "nearly working" or "half broken" behavior. Most
of the time you start with a good state of mind and think that you will
be able to do something and suddenly you lost a day and get frustrated.
For example, EventRecorder when we say not to save the file still ask
you (I will try to fix that)
TextMorphProperty when the the text is too large does not fit on the
screen (I tried to add a ScrollPane but failed),
BookMorph sortPages breaks when there are more than 40 slides (in my
version I remove the test),
BookMorph does not save anymore on files (again I tried to add a file
server but the code is quite complex). I will continue but I'm sure
that it will work.
I saw a lot of code that is in but is empty, or class have bad name
(AlansText, ProjectRefactoring,....really cool). I already fixed
I saw a lot of properties used everywhere and this makes the code
extremely hard to browse
and understand.
BookMorph>>fromUser is empty
May be this is because I'm bad in Morphic but my impression is there is
a lot of stuff broken in Morphic and in Squeak in general.
So I would like to know how we could proceed to rescue some of the
squeak asset.
- Should we rewrite some of them from scratch?
- Is there some people around willing to spend some evenings fixing so
key classes?
- I think that it would be nice to take a month and focus on a class
and fix it.
But alone I feel that I will never make it.
- Should we keep it like that and continue to claim that this is cool
while everything is
only working if you fix it (and you have the precondition that you are
an expert).
- I will continue to harvest as much as I can the good fix of ned so
this will improve the situation.
But I'm sure that having some task force to fix some parts would be a
good answer to the problem.
Stef
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