Squeak-dev Digest, Vol 22, Issue 20

Andres Valloud sqrmax at cox.net
Sat Oct 16 19:08:54 UTC 2004


Hello Andreas,

Friday, October 15, 2004, 5:00:07 PM, you wrote:

>> How would you detect a missing method in a dynamic system? Aside from
>> the trivial case of there being no method at all of the appropriate name
>> (which Smalltalks detect already) what would you do?
AR> Well, this is where it gets interesting and why I think we need a
AR> static type system in Squeak. [...] And suddenly, the whole type
AR> system becomes a meta-layer for expressing some of the
AR> relationships between classes throughout the system and that can
AR> be useful for many different areas.

This is just a solution looking for a problem.

You can certainly find all such silly mistakes by spending time in
acceptance and unit tests first - which, besides, should be written
anyway.

If the code isn't clear enough to show the relationships between
classes throughout the system, the problem is the code.  Why should a
type system save us the trouble of writing clear code that can be
shared with others and understood by others?  What happened to the
idea of a system that can be understood by a single person?

Unfortunately, to me, this sounds very similar to a topic heavily
discussed previously - that of frameworks being too closely
intertwined, a.k.a. the Monolithic Image.  Things have not changed.

Could that meta-layer be an existing implementation of the declarative
approach to Smalltalk?  The ones that come to mind don't need types
to work.

Smalltalk is powerful because it does NOT have many "features".  It
should be kept that way.

Andres.




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