Re: [Pharo-users] understanding existing code

[Peter H. Meadows via Pharo-users]

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I found that at first I was very slow at reading/groking Smalltalk
code, it was like being in a twisty maze with lots of paths leading to
tiny little rooms that make little sense if you're only thinking about
the room that you're in. I wondered if Smalltalk wasn't over
complicating things with all it's tiny methods. But the more time I
spent using the tools (browse senders/implementers / and debugger) to
slowly go through the maze, the more it started to make sense. These
days I feel like Smalltalk is the perfect system for allowing me to
quickly understand what the code does. I think the more you read code
the more you start to develop intuition about how things are usually
put together, and often I see methods and patterns and think 'ahh,
that probably does this', and i don't even need to check
senders/implementers. I also noticed that now when i read new code I
tend to look from a higher level first and make some guesses about
what is doing what, then zoom in and get the details.

On 5 January 2017 at 19:24, Siemen Baader <siemenbaa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I may be missing the obvious, but what are good strategies to understand the
> structure of existing code? Specifically, I'm trying to understand more of
> PharoJS to solve my own problems and eventually also to contribute back -
> but this is a general question.
>
> There is this one MOOC exercise:
> http://rmod-pharo-mooc.lille.inria.fr/MOOC/Exercises/Exercises-Pillar/Pillar-Questions.pdf
> that helps, and reading tests and comments helps if they exist. But I often
> get trapped in drilling down a long call stack and opening many, many
> browser windows, a new one for every message send to a new class.
>
> While writing this it occured to me that I can use the debugger to follow a
> call stack by putting a breakpoint in the top level method, then stepping
> down using the debugger. There is also a MOOC lecture on that that I will
> look at again,
> http://rmod-pharo-mooc.lille.inria.fr/MOOC/Videos/W5/C019-W2S-VideosDebugger1-UsingTheDebugger-V2-HD_720p_4Mbs.m4v.
>
> Any tips? I think I don't see the forest for the trees here I'm afraid :)
>
> thanks,
> Siemen

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