I happen to own that book so I did take a look at it last night and then another look and then another and was still not convinced.
You see I am a practical person , and even though I am nowhere near to being a pro code I have my fair share of libraries and their design. The thing that I learned is what others may consider a good design , simple and easy to understand for me it becomes quite a problem and quite the opposite. Kent Becks makes the big assumption that people's brain work the same way. Just because he sees his methods and can immediately understand what they do because of a good design that does not apply for everyone. About having a specialized tool does not solve the problem its just makes it more tolerable. Its just like telling you that I wont remove the bugs from my programm instead I will give you a debugger so you can do it easier. It makes the big assumption that the developer really cares how the library works. He does not, only thing he wants is to use the library and in many cases not even the entire library just portions of it. What happens when he does not know what portions exactly to use to get the result he wants does he go through tracing every singe method ? Is this really simple coding ? For me small methods , EVERY method needs a comment , not because its that hard to read a few lines of code but because its plain simpler and faster. And the whole argument that comments are extra labor , yes its true , but one thing I have learned is coding is 99% reading and 1% about writting to use Kent Becks numbers. Unless you use libraries you already know where obviously you fall outside the scope of this discussion. I never saw documentation or writting comments as the time wasting that many coders see it. I find bug hunting way more troublesome. At least you confirmed my suspicion that this theory is based on the over confidence of code design. There is some truth into it of course , but its too unreliable at least for me. Thank you for taking the time to explain things to this detail I really appreciate it. -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-dev-Small-Methods-dont-need-comments-true-or-myth-tp4688177p4688327.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
