[self-interest] documentation!

[Russell Allen]

I started out using aCollection or equivalent because that’s normal in Smalltalk, but I’ve really come to appreciate very short methods which are single liners without method slots - especially since they show up in outliners without expanding. And as I’ve become more familiar with the tools I find myself relying less on the names of method arguments for hints on how they work.

One place where the lack of explicit typing makes it harder is where method names are semantically overloaded - i.e. where the system has not just multiple implementations of someMethodName: but the multiple implementations mean different things. But maybe that scenario should be painful.

Russell 


> On 25 Jul 2016, at 7:57 AM, David Ungar ungar at me.com [self-interest] <self-interest at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
> Yes, aCollection would help as compared to c. But what I think would be better is an explanation for do:. I think there might be one in one of the Self documents, come to think of it.
> The problem with ‘aCollection’ everywhere is that it’s a lot longer to type. The environment would ideally help with that.
> 
>> On Jul 24, 2016, at 2:54 PM, Bystroushaak bystrousak at kitakitsune.org [self-interest] <self-interest at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>> 
>> I mean message signature/header (sorry, I have no idea how to call it), 
>> eg `addAll: c`.
>> 
>> If it was written as `addAll: collection`, it would be much more 
>> clearer. It would be even better if the comment contained the 
>> information, that `collection` may be anything responding to `do:` message.
>> 
>> I know how the ducktyping works. My point was just that it is possible 
>> to put more informations into the API names and talk to the programmer, 
>> so he don't need to study whole source code.
>> 
>> Dne 24.7.2016 v 23:45 David Ungar ungar at me.com [self-interest] napsal(a):
>>> I’m not sure you get it: there is no signature, no such concept in
>>> Self. That’s part of what I’m trying to say. It’s a different model
>>> of computation.
>>> 
>>> The concepts are more like natural language concepts. If a thing
>>> wants to pretend it’s like a collection, it will implement do:. It
>>> may only partially pretend and not implement all of collectionness.
>>> But that may be fine for a particular use case.
>> 
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