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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