Good, thorough Smalltalk reference

Andrew Catton andrew at smallthought.com
Mon Jan 16 06:01:41 UTC 2006


One nice thing for Smalltalk newbies would be to have a (short)  
tutorial on "how to understand Squeak/Smalltalk without a  
reference".. this would contain all the knowledge an experienced  
Smalltalker uses to understand a new package: how to use senders-of,  
implementors-of, the debugger, etc. to answer questions as they arise.

Don't know if such a beast exists, but if it did it would be a nice  
companion to the traditional (and correct) "the reference is the  
system itself" response..

Andrew

On 15-Jan-06, at 9:51 PM, tim Rowledge wrote:

>> joshscholar at nightstudies.net wrote:
>>> Me too. I've yet to find a good reference for all of the standard  
>>> classes.
>>> I don't need or want tutorials, I just want a thorough reference.
> It's not possible to have a 'thorough reference' other than the  
> system itself. As soon as you add, delete or edit a method - which  
> of course happens any time you load a package - it would be out of  
> date and no longer thorough.
>
> A static bit of paper or pdf is essentially useless as soon as it  
> is written when referring to a dynamic system. You can, certainly,  
> have a fairly static description of the *language* Smalltalk since  
> that doesn't change much. It would be short and not terribly  
> helpful much of the time since you could memorize it in no time. A  
> page or two at most, about as long as a list of C precedence rules.
>
> Almost any of the classic Smalltalk books on Stephan's site will  
> have a decent level of reasonable-reference material but it will be  
> incomplete for the Squeak system. Tough luck I'm afraid. Live with  
> it. The only plausible reference is the system as it exists while  
> you are examining it.  Any other way involves that quaint old- 
> fashioned idiocy so beloved of the java-weenies, C++ chumps and  
> other dinosaurs - sourcecode in files. I mean, what an idea. So  
> last century.
>
> What we can have, should have and pretty much don't have is decent  
> friggin' comments as to what classes are intended for, how they are  
> implemented and their limitations, along with comments in the code  
> to give some decent level of meaning. Comments in the system can be  
> (but usually aren't) kept up to date. Better yet we could develop  
> tools to replace the current browsers that make writing code more  
> like writing documentation that has the implementation included as  
> it goes, what my friend Dan Lanovaz refers to as a software book.   
> But then we'd get complaints from the sort of plonkers that claim  
> 'oh, my code is so clearly written that it needs no comments'. Gits.
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Strange OpCodes: JUM: Jeer at User's Mistake
>
>
>

======================

Andrew Catton
Smallthought Systems Inc.
andrew at smallthought.com






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