>> How many lectures did you give? It is annoying to have to explain something >> that usually people do not need to know. > I don’t give any lectures to students but I often try to „teach“ Smalltalk to > some of my colleagues and friends. And with that I have hard times. > Typically „experienced“ software developers think about themselves as being > experts in object orientation and programming languages, > even if they have only experiences with C, C# and C++. „Teaching“ them about > Smalltalk’s idea of object orientation is VERY hard, almost > impossible because they already know everything (read: they are ignorant) and > lazy. I guess there are some similarities to students.
+1 on this >> >> Newcomers do not use pooldictionaries. In 10 years smalltalking I used them >> twice. > Newcomers don’t use a lot of things but that should not be a reason to hide > them. In my experience newcomers need guidance and rules but > „oldtimers“ need freedom. This is one of the reasons I really enjoy dynamic > typing and Smalltalk. I don’t like to obey to artificial rules that only > put permanent burden to me in order to protect me from something I might do > wrong sometimes. > > At the moment I am considering pool dictionaries for a solution of a problem > at hand: I need to collect some information (warnings, errors, and reports) > over lots of related and unrelated classes. For the moment I have parameters, > but that is getting inconvenient with a growing number of things to collect… > So, if you need something it should be there and not necessarily obscured and > hidden! > If you don’t see features you don’t know what the machine can do for you. Obscuring things is sometimes a good design strategy, but here there is a well known artefact breaking tradition here, that isn’t something light. And the proposed alternative design is far to be better (read: have been proven itself worth of its added burden of breaking that tradition) Students shouldn’t be underestimated they can handle ignoring what they don’t need, no problem >> >> We just need a full class template menu item. > Yes, but it’s not there yet but this change already took away some power > without giving me back something in exchange! > I am able to ignore some parts of class creation message easily (I also don’t > use class variables that often) and I don’t see why students > shouldn’t be able, too. Quite contrary I think if you hide these things from > students they won’t see it, won’t get curious and in the end will only > learn the boring parts of Smalltalk… > Yeah, you’re not the only one with that perception. This move sucks. It allegedly solved a problem that allegedly happens to some by creating a problem for almost everybody. It’s a half-ass non-solution Do you really love cleaning that up? Go ahead and do it after you prove to us (non-newcomers, so non-early adopters but conservatives users) that your alternative not only is clean but rocks (more convenient is some other way). The second part of your homework on this design decision was completely ignored so expecting it to be loved (popular) is unrealistic And by not doing that you just added a problem where there was none Not willing to do that second part? Then don’t fix what isn’t broken.
