[squeak-dev] A Sad Day

Nicolas Cellier nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com
Fri Aug 14 21:38:00 UTC 2020


Le ven. 14 août 2020 à 22:57, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> a écrit :

>
>
> > On 2020-08-14, at 12:42 PM, Vanessa Freudenberg <vanessa at codefrau.net>
> wrote:
> >
>
> >
> > Smalltalk used to be a system that can be fully understood by a single
> person - truly a personal computing system. That is no longer the case.
>
> Yes; a long time ago when the system was smaller (ST80v2 I guess) I could
> basically recite the source of any method in the system from memory. But
> back then the image ran in 1Mb. And did very little.
>
> Ah same reference, I swear that I went thru each and every method in v2.3
and could master and understand what each did.
In STV too, but that's cheating, the compiler was hidden ;)

I can say that such thing never happened in Squeak, despite 15 years of
(superficial) usage.

>
> > All the functionality we added over the years comes at the price of
> complexity (not to mention speed). It makes the system hard to understand.
> It makes it hard to see the design principles. We have not found a way to
> eliminate, or at least hide, any of the complexity we introduced.
>
> It's an ever present tension.
>
> Stuff in the default image tends to get cared for, because it's right
> there blowing up when you make a bad change. Too much stuff in the default
> image makes for irritating bloat (cough, EToys, cough). Have stuff outside
> the image default image (seaside, magma, metacello, etc) and it gets broken
> too easily unless enough people are regularly using it to notice issues.
>
> Change things to improve stuff or fix problems and you will inevitably
> break something else. And always, things get added that are incomplete and
> not totally thought out and/or not fully integrated with the existing code.
>
> Unless you can afford the time to keep track of all that is going on,
> every time there is a new release it will be a major effort to port
> forward. Skip one or two releases and you are in real trouble - which is
> what I suggest the root issue is here for Trygve. Trying to jump form 3.1
> to 5.3 ... eek. It's almost certainly as much trouble as porting from VW8.3
> to Sq5.3. However, it *can* be done, with help.
>
> I wish, oh how I wish, that we had the resources to do proper reviews
> before including new things and bug fixes.
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Oxymorons: Exact estimate
>
>
>
>
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