[squeak-dev] Re: <Method Tags> (Pragmas)

Ralph Johnson johnson at cs.uiuc.edu
Fri Apr 30 12:07:29 UTC 2010


On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 2:00 AM, Travis Griggs <travisgriggs at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> One problem with this sort of 4GL'ification that was layered on top of
> VisualWorks 1.0 in this and other areas, was that you create an interesting
> dilemma for the programmer. There's two different ways of defining a Menu
> action now. I can go the supposed easy way with a quick tag shorthand
> notation, or I can send real messages. When do I choose which approach? How
> do I know when to give up on the one, and switch to the other? How do I swap
> back and forth? IMO, the effort is usually better spent making your API
> simple and easy to discover and use messages all the way down.


This is a great summary of a common design issue.  It happens when people
make configuration files.  HTML tags.  Even when you make a Builder object
in Smalltalk.  It is hard to make sure there is only one way to do
something, and when there are two ways, people have to choose, causing more
work and making programming take longer.

-Ralph
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