+1 Thanks for sharing that!  He's got my vote.  I'm using his code
extensively but I started with 3.9 so I didn't even know it was broken.  

You have said a number of times that we do not do enough to recognize
contributions.  Maybe we should consider having Squeak Awards?

Ron Teitelbaum

> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:squeak-dev-
> bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Andreas Raab
> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2007 5:00 AM
> To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
> Subject: Refactoring of the Year?
> 
> Hi Guys -
> 
> I'm just in a writing mood today so I thought I'd share a short story.
> Most of you are probably aware how I have been bitching and moaning
> about "random refactorings" that move things from one corner of the
> system to the other, rename them incompatibly in the meantime and just
> generally leave more cruft and problems than they solve?
> 
> Well, I just had a completely opposite experience that shows Refactoring
> Done Right. The short version is: We had some serious problems at Qwaq
> with SocketStream in Croquet (which is a 3.8 variant) that has a variety
> of problems in it (our main problem was the lock-up you get in next: if
> a particular sequence of steps occurs). I was finally able to track this
> down to SocketStream and was ready to start a discussion on Squeak-dev
> when I -just to confirm it- tried it in 3.9 and noticed that it worked
> just fine there and that 3.9 has the FastSocketStream version instead of
> the 3.8 version.
> 
> So ... okay I thought this is going to break a number of things since
> really, it's a complete reimplementation so what can you expect. But I
> was willing to debug it and fix the remaining problems because
> SocketStream had proven to be simply to unreliable. Filed in
> SocketStream, immediately ran into two problems (missing methods in
> Socket that it required) added those.
> 
> And that was it. I didn't change another line of code other than these
> (basically internal) changes. It just worked. It has the same interface,
> it works the same. Only better. Faster. More reliable.
> 
> Suffice it to say, I was impressed. I had gotten so used to the
> assumption that a new version of a class (as well as Squeak) is so
> fundamentally incompatible with previous versions that I stopped porting
> stuff when we reached 3.9. SocketStream was the nicest exception to that
> pattern that I've seen in the last two years or so.
> 
> Can I officially request that we award Goran a medal for the
> "Refactoring of the Year"? Something that basically nobody noticed but
> that has a profound impact on network performance and reliability
> certainly qualifies for that.
> 
> Cheers,
>     - Andreas