Thoughts from an outsider

J J azreal1977 at hotmail.com
Wed Aug 30 20:09:48 UTC 2006


Yes, the version system right as part of the IDE is amazing and powerful.
Perhaps the issue we are having is that you are thinking of someone
wanting to change the subsystem, and I am (mostly) thinking of people
using the subsystem.  I have identified that "X" will do what I want, now
I have it downloaded, what do I do with it?  Unit tests can give me examples
but that isn't very formal, you know? :)

(I relize I also mentioned lines of any code over a certain amount, but I
can and have been flexable on that point with people I work with).

>From: "Darius Clarke" <socinian at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list"<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Re: Thoughts from an outsider
>Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 13:04:19 -0700
>
>My single counter point. The code almost never explains how or why
>something was deleted /out/ of the code because it was Bad.
>
>Don't assume everything in past versions is everything the programmer
>wrote in that method. Much of what the programmer learned was
>something he tried/failed and threw away, but which a new user might
>try /again/ because it was NOT in the code already. All the convenient
>searching shortcuts begin to fail if you need to find out how code has
>changed over time as one tries to understand it or how not to redo
>something bad.
>
>The code also rarely tells you that the code which you may
>"understand" actually has code smell, is a /bad/ example, or is an
>archaic style of programming. Java may be inconsistent, but so is the
>Squeak class library... all the way down.
>
>Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees.
>
>Cheers,
>Darius
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