> On 13 Apr 2018, at 12:40, Sven Van Caekenberghe <s...@stfx.eu> wrote:
>
>
>
>> On 13 Apr 2018, at 12:19, Joe Shirk <j.b.sh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I've been a lurk-fan for a long time but this brings up something that
>> distressed me. Richard Eng, Smalltalk Renaissance hero loves to say
>> Smalltalk's grammar/syntax fits on a postcard.
>>
>> But the vocabulary doesn't. There is nothing English-like about the always
>> expanding bewildering library namespaces.
>>
The package names that just use the “project name” can be problematic… too many
words. e.g. “Hiedra”? No idea. (there are ideas of how to improve, I will not
list them here as this should
not turn into discussion about this issue).
The way we present packages (and their granularity) is not “right”. Namespaces
are a problem in addition…
So yes: we have a lot of thing to improve!
.
>> GT what? Oh a newbie might eventually figure out it means Glamorous Toolkit.
>> These are meaningless brands. In this drive to come up with creative names
>> for "just objects" that explain nothing at all, Smalltalk is becoming like
>> Java or PHP hell.
>> Just look at those examples through the eyes of a novice. The purity is
>> nowhere to be found.
>> :(
>
> You are right, but in 'the real world' it is no longer possible to reserve
> the nice, simple names for just one variant. The prefixes are a poor mans
> namespace mechanism. You have to read over them.
>
> Inspector, EyeInspector, GTInspector, ...
>
> I rather have cool alternatives and the development of new ideas than 'one
> ring to rule them all' or no/slow progress. Remember that we develop in a
> live system, changing things while testing them, this is often hard.
> Alternative subsystems help a lot.
It should be clear that what we have is what we managed to do, not what we
dreamed about… I, too, would like to have this clean, nice, small, amazing
system… but it is not always easy.
There is a lot we can (and will!) improve!
Marcus
