Animorphic ST (Strongtalk) released!

Diego Gomez Deck DiegoGomezDeck at ConsultAr.com
Sat Jul 20 16:20:42 UTC 2002


Hello,

[snip]
>All these kinds of things are very important if you have to work with 
>complex frameworks and/or other people's code, often poorly written, and 
>need to get a good understanding of what it does, and what not.
>
>In Smalltalk (without types) no tool can exactly know the type of an 
>expression and code completion (with is IMHO the best productivity tool of 
>a modern IDE) cannot offer a valid selection of applicable method names.

The point here is: You have an object and you don't known what messages you 
have to send? No tool can help here.

>Currently, I'm working with a very large (VisualAge Smalltalk project 
>which was grown over the last five years or so - and most original 
>developers left the company long ago - and it's awful difficult, I want 
>Eclipse (and Java) back.   Never thought, that I'd say that but if 
>mediocre programmers hack quick fixes into a system for a couple of years, 
>Smalltalk becomes a mess.  This is probably true for other languages, too, 
>but at least types would give you some kind of documentation.

Could be, but the types generate more "rigid" (dead?) system more difficult 
to refactor.

>   They also provide some help for refactoring - there're of course no 
> unit tests so you better don't change what you don't understand because 
> you cannot break a system which is in use by more than 500 in-house customers.

I feel that here is the main point:  UnitTest.

In my experience, I never had a "type error" in my systems that the 
unit-tests can not find. (And all of these errors was fixed in minutes in 
the debugger).

     Smalltalk + UnitTest = StrongTypedSystem?NoThanks

>I found it much easier to get my way through the Eclipse Java source code.

I had exactly the same type of problems in "sure" typed system (to say: 
Java).  With other problems: (classIsNotAnObject, nullIsNotAnObject, and a 
large list of etc)

[snip]
>Stefan Matthias Aust

Cheers,

Diego Gomez Deck





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