<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 10:07 PM, tim Rowledge <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tim@rowledge.org" target="_blank">tim@rowledge.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
There is a modestly informative page on the swiki at <a href="http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/538" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/538</a> 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*<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Never used traits either. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
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.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Not used this.</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
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.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I have looked at the code, but not really understood it. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
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.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Universes was a SquakMap kind of tool, but since there is no server running, it's pretty useless. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
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.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>You can always doIt HelpBrowser openOn: aClass which will bring up all class and method comments for that class. </div><div>By the way, that should be added to the browser class pane menu...</div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Karl</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<span class=""><br>
tim<br>
--<br>
tim Rowledge; <a href="mailto:tim@rowledge.org">tim@rowledge.org</a>; <a href="http://www.rowledge.org/tim" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.rowledge.org/tim</a><br>
</span>Useful Latin Phrases:- Nullo metro compositum est = It doesn't rhyme.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
</blockquote></div><br></div></div>