Squeak-dev Digest, Vol 22, Issue 20
Giovanni Giorgi
jj at objectsroot.com
Fri Oct 15 10:28:28 UTC 2004
Ciao!
Rick McGeer ha scritto in data 15/10/2004 1.24:
> [...]
> This gets to the heart of the strong- vs weak-typing issue, and so
> let's address it. The notion that there is a clean separation between
> design-, compile-, and execution time is a myth; and an expensive and
> destructive one at that. Software isn't a concrete artifact like a
> boat or a car or an airplane. It's an instantiation of a dynamic
> interaction with an environment.
This is a very interesting point.
> This means paper designs aren't worth the disk space they're written
> on -- because nobody understands a dynamic interaction until they see
> it in action. In other words, coding is design and design is coding.
> [...] This also means that coding never stops, because the environment
> the code executes in is constantly changing. A talented programmer
> understands this, writes for a bald environment (in other words,
> makes very few assumptions about what the environment looks like),
I cannot agree to this. The correct statement in my humble opinion is
"Coding is *poor* design", at least in software for production environment.
I find difficult to do a continuous coding and to leverage it to a good
design, *when* the driving force is a strong marketing, and you cannot
count on stable specs and so on.
My all-day-work is a good balance between "Code as a monkey" and "Design
as a monk, thinking BEFORE writing something and looking at a UML
diagram ipnotizing me :)".
When I am a monk :) I order the classes by "potential frequency of
change", implementing the more unstable in a very fast way.
I agree it is impossible to statically "prevent" every error: this is a
utopistic idea.... I know it now :)
Coding by examples or like an animal adapting to a unknown environment
is a working but slow tactic.
So the project management accept the use of strongly-typed language
because it seems more simple to control and to track changes with them.
By the way compiler can produce a little more efficent code knowing
types and so....
I do not know if it is even possible to gain the same ability to track
changes in a "self or smalltalk"-like language.
Lat but not least: Java is going to become a dynamic language with a lot
of very very static types in the code :-)
[...]
--
.............................................................
Giovanni Giorgi ObjectWay SpA - Milano
http://www.objectway.it via Boltraffio, 7 - 20156 Milano
.............................................................
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|