[squeak-dev] The Inbox: Traits-pre.307.mcz

Frank Shearar frank.shearar at gmail.com
Mon Nov 23 14:30:43 UTC 2015


On 20 November 2015 at 18:40, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> Should we keep Traits? It was a neat idea that I was happy to support but it got left unfinished. Where are tools to develop & manage Traits? Where is the usage?
>
> Unless there is a compelling reason - and subsequent effort to fill out support - I suggest we should remove them. Along with Islands. And Universes. And probably Environments too, since that has stalled without becoming a proper part of the system.

There's definitely a pattern there: someone has a great idea for a
fairly advanced capability, heroically tries to do all the work solo,
or with minimal help from the community, burns out and the work never
gets finished.

Traits, or things close enough to traits that you end up splitting
hairs to tell them apart, are a core feature of so many languages
nowadays (Ruby, Newspeak, Scala, Perl 6, Rust, off the top of my
head), while we let the idea die on the vine, for want of tooling
support. And I'm sure Environments will, too.

Sure, if it's not providing value, and no one's willing to do the
work, just kill the thing and be done. I'd rather see people pitch in
and help _make_ the dang thing a proper part of the system. ("Thing"
here applies mostly to Environments, but Islands and Traits too.) But
I'm also not going to run around pointing fingers: I'm too burned out
to do anything to help, so I'll just shut up now.

frank

> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Strange OpCodes: IG: Insert Garbage
>
>
>


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