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

karl ramberg karlramberg at gmail.com
Mon Nov 23 21:52:46 UTC 2015


On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 10:07 PM, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:

> 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*
>

Never used traits either.

>
> 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.
>

Not used this.

>
> 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.
>

I have looked at the code, but not really understood it.

>
> 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.
>

Universes was a SquakMap kind of tool, but since there is no server
running, it's pretty useless.

>
> 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.
>

You can always doIt HelpBrowser openOn: aClass which will bring up all
class and method comments for that class.
By the way, that should be added to the browser class pane menu...

Best,
Karl

>
> 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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