[From the soapbox:] election details *PLEASE READ*

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Thu Feb 22 07:36:49 UTC 2007


Adrian Lienhard wrote:
> Of course the tools are not perfect. Instead of helping to improve the 
> situation people tend to complain. Unfortunately this will not bring us 
> forward. But hey, its not that important, is it?

Isn't it more like: To use traits you need tools, to write tools you 
need to understand traits, and to understand traits you need to use them?

I've been poking around in the traits implementation myself (fairly well 
documented in [1], and [2]) and although I have a very good 
understanding about the metaclass relationships in Squeak < 3.9 I found 
the traits implementation basically impenetrable. If I look at who 
implements a method and get ten implementors thrown at me where there 
used to be one or two, it's just not helpful. I stopped digging into it 
for that reason - the traits class kernel has become completely 
inaccessible to me.

I'm starting to think that implementing traits using traits may have 
been a mistake for that very reason. Maybe this should have done as a 
second step or so. But the way the situation is I think there may only 
be half a dozen people in the world who have any idea of how that traits 
kernel works. The rest is doomed to use tools that are simply not up to 
the job and have basically no chance to really get into it.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

[1]http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2005-August/094009.html
[2]http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-October/110494.html



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