[squeak-dev] Improving visibility of comments in Shout renders code within SqueakTheme

Marcel Taeumel marcel.taeumel at hpi.de
Tue May 17 09:16:58 UTC 2022


Hi Chris --

> It's human-speak, whereas the upright code speaks to the computer. 

Not quite. Anybody can write something that the computer can understand. Good source code, however, is something humans can easily understand. In Smalltalk, good code can almost read like a sentence in natural language. It's a challenge, but it is often possible.

As for comments, bad ones are possibly full of slang, proverbs, and other stuff that "human-speak" might reveal. Good comments are kind of structured and explanatory. Thus, closer to what might sometimes be almost source code.

Consequently, putting effort in making comments strongly distinct from source code is counterproductive to what we actually want to achieve here. I think. :-)

Best,
Marcel
Am 17.05.2022 03:31:21 schrieb Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com>:
No ultra-strong opinion here, but in general, comments are an inherent part of Smalltalk. As code and comments tell a shared story together, I'm not convinced by separating both from each other even more. Italic has a "virtual", "artificial", or "auxiliary" connotation to me, as opposed to "normal" or "real" code.
Interesting, this is actually why I use italic for comments.  It's human-speak, whereas the upright code speaks to the computer.  Italics is often used in writing for referring to external quotations, which enhance the thing being written about.  It seems like a perfect fit, to me.
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