[squeak-dev] Re: Overrides. Evil. Need to do something with it.

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Wed May 5 16:46:25 UTC 2010


On 5 May 2010 19:23, Sam Adams <ssadams at us.ibm.com> wrote:
> +1
>
> Freedom to override anything, anywhere, anytime is essential for Smalltalk.
Sure, as long as you doing this at home.
But don't tell me this is a cool thing, when you authoring a public package.

> It is not evil, just as a DNU hack is not evil, but it does have serious
> consequences once your code leaves your image and enters another. Freedom
> comes with responsibilities and consequences.
> Banning overrides would be a very bad thing, but tracking and reporting such
> situations to either/both producer/consumer is a very good thing.

Its not a bad thing. Either you play under rules, or get banned.
Either you follow the convention, established by community to not
overwrite methods in classes,
which does not belong to your package, and then you can make your
package available for error-free installation into
any community maintained image,
or you don't follow the convention, then you still can offer a users
the way how to download your content,
just not in a form of package, but in a form of an image instead,
where you are free to hack everything and change
anything, and nobody will even think to tell you that this is a bad thing.

> I would prefer a preload scan like the delightful "code-file browser" that
> collects and informs me about these issues in batch rather than a streaming
> nag dialog that makes me click as each one files in (reminds me of the
> Mac-vs-PC Vista commercial....Permission to xxx? shudder).
>
> Regards,
> Sam
>
>
> Sam S. Adams, IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM Research
> Mobile: 919-696-6064, email: ssadams at us.ibm.com
> Asst: Kenndra K. Quiles. (732) 926-2292 Fax: (732) 926-2455, email:
> Kenndra at us.ibm.com
> <<Hebrews 11:6, Proverbs 3:5-6, Romans 1:16-17, I Corinthians 1:10>>
>
>
>>
>> "Evil" is too strong a word.  Perhaps "unfortunate".   Ideally we
>> would not need overrides, but people do not write ideal code.  Given
>> the fact that people are constantly publishing packages that are
>> imperfect, it is useful for people who use their packages to be able
>> to override things in them.  You can argue that we really ought to
>> fix the packages, but perhaps we don't know enough to fix it properly.
>>
>> One of the many ways in which Smalltalk is better than Java is that
>> a package can override methods in other packages.
>>
>> -Ralph Johnson
>
>
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.



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