Johan

YOU ARE RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT. I spent a significant amount of time teaching Smalltalk to know that you are right.
And this change will be in the system :)

Just people that know something totally ignore what is it to learn something.
Imagine people are scared and close the debuggers. Oscar wrote patterns and I always say the debugger is your best friend so do not close it.

Stef

I don�t see how this change make Smalltalk (the language) simpler. For me this change looks more like an obfuscation than a simplification.

How many lectures did you give? It is annoying to have to explain something that usually people do not need to know.

To complement this: in my own experience as a full-time prof, whenever you are teaching and at a given point you need to say: 'I cannot explain this yet' or resort to handwaving there is something wrong. Do I need to explain pooldictionaries to be able to talk about class creation? No, I should not need to do that.

I get this feeling with Java all the time. First hello world example in Java is always a mess. public static void main(String[] args) OMG. Start to explain all that just to do a println? Were is the simplicity there? I don't want to have this kind of feeling when I explain Smalltalk.

How should newcomers know how to enter pool dictionaries? I rarely use pool dictionaries and if I will need it I surely have forgotten about
this change and expect irritation and frustration.

Newcomers do not use pooldictionaries. In 10 years smalltalking I used them twice.

I agree with Stef that pooldictionaries are advanced features. I have been Smalltalking since 1998 and I have never used them.


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Johan Fabry   -   http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry
PLEIAD lab  -  Computer Science Department (DCC)  -  University of Chile