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

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Mon Nov 23 21:07:45 UTC 2015


Doing anything  big is a pain, even if you’re being paid to do it, have assigned colleagues that you can direct, and know what you’re doing. Most companies fail miserably at it.

In an open source project you add an entire galaxy of extra pain. Herding cats doesn’t even begin to cover it; if you have a decent group of fans of your idea(s) you still face the problems of lack of time, other interests, arguments and on and on. It is a perfect example why the fantasy of ‘the free market will solve everything!’ is so fatuous.

Traits; I liked the idea, as I said. But I’ve never felt the lack of them, nor worked on anything where I thought “hhmm, a trait would be useful here” and with no support in any tools nor easily accessible documentation that might lead me to a fuller appreciation etc... forget it. The only response we’ve had to  offer any idea why we ought to care was Marcel saying he found them a bit useful for documenting something. That isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. 

There is a modestly informative page on the swiki at http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/538 but it dates back to 2006! The commentary in-image is dismal (as is pretty standard, to our disgrace) and offers nothing I can spot that could encourage me to use them, let alone any pointers on how. There’s nothing I can see to indicate Traits actually being used in-image so there’s nothing that makes me think it worth digging further. The only Trait stuff I can find is in fact in the 311Deprecated-Traits category. 3.11 was quite a while ago. Oh, wait, there is a set of tests that might explain something *if they were damn well documented*

Islands; I can’t find anything about them. The swiki has a few pages of approximately 0 information content. In fact it doesn’t seem like they’re even in the image, so I have no idea.

Environments: I like the idea of namespaces that help avoid class/ivar/message name clashes. I don’t see any info to help me make use of them, or when it might be useful, or how to find them. I see very few comments in code, virtually none for classes, nothing in the tests. Haven’t been able to spot any swiki info either.

Universes; I can’t even see enough info to gain an idea of what they’re for! The only bit I spotted points to stuff on a server that no longer exists and probably hasn’t since ’06.

The software world in general seems to be useless at this; we’re nothing special. There are people out there that think running some parser over a tree of text files and extracting function comments is an adequate way to create a manual! There are others that will claim that the ‘code is self documenting’ which really ought to be a capital crime.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful Latin Phrases:- Nullo metro compositum est = It doesn't rhyme.




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