On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 10:09:01AM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> On 20-07-2013, at 9:36 AM, Bob Arning <arning315 at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> > When I see longer ways of saying something replacing shorter ways, I always wonder if the perceived benefit has been realized. Are there success stories out there for "SmalltalkImage current" enabling something cool that "Smalltalk" could not?
> 

None that I am aware of.

> IIRC the original idea was that SystemDictionary was overloaded with nothing-to-do-with-dictionary methods and needed to go on a diet. I don't recall it being suggested that the smarter thing would have been to remove the *dictionary* stuff and put that somewhere else to use as an environment for compiling, leaving the useful system management methods attached to something called 'Smalltalk'. I really don't like the current (sic) setup where there is SmalltalkImage SystemNavigation and Smalltalk and probably other split out stuff I haven't even found.
> 
> Time for re-unification.
>

Yes. Some if this is half-finished work that probably falls under the category
of what Andreas rather uncharitably (but accurately) referred to as "random
refactorings" from the Squeak 3.9 era. From my point of view, it was stuff
being shuffled about for the sake of moving it around, but without a coherent
conceptual basis for the "improvements".

Having said that, I do think that allowing "Smalltalk" to become a dumping
ground for otherwise homeless methods is not a very good idea either, so some
amount of refactoring is in order. And I think that it is a good thing to have
some conceptual separation between things that are associated with the Smalltalk
environment itself, versus things that are associated with the virtual machine
(capabilities or lack thereof in the supporting VM), versus things that are
associated with the underlying platform (operating system, file systems,
and so forth).

I have not really wrapped my head around Environments yet, but I'm pretty
sure that this is a very good thing, and that it will help to clarify things
conceptually. So this seems to be a good time to rethink some of the earlier
mis-factorings and put them into a more clearly defined context. So, for
example, the notion of a "current Smalltalk image" seems like complete
nonsense to me, but the the notion of a current Environment might make a
lot of sense. The notion of a current VM also makes sense (we restart our
images on different VMs that have different capabilities). And it probably
makes sense to have something that represents the current operating system
platform (the "same" VM might be running on different operating systems
and/or different file systems).

Dave