2013/1/30 Frank Shearar <frank.shearar@gmail.com>
On 30 January 2013 22:20, Nicolas Cellier < nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com> wrote:
In st-80 these were protocols and the name make you think of it differently. If you want to continue thinking of it in term of category, then I understand your miss-conception. I'm curious to know when the term category was introduced... Maybe with Monticello where it means 'Package'? Clever hacks sometimes are not that clever...
Nicolas
Sure. I also remember people talking about "the protocol of Foo", meaning the set of messages that Foo understood. That's how the Objective-C and Clojure people understand the term, for what it's worth.
Sometimes the those who came before named things poorly... :)
I don't know what you think was named poorly... I just wonder, in term of communicating by sending messages, what is the best name for defining the set of messages an object can understand? Category or protocol ;) Nicolas frank
2013/1/30 Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name>
Am 30.01.2013 um 22:03 schrieb Nicolas Cellier < nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com>:
First, these are not categories. categories are for classes. These are protocols.
Well, that's one reason I took the term "uncategorized". If I take the context menu in the category (!) pane I see
So it looks to me that pharo has the notion of categories for organizing methods.
A protocol is like an interface, or you can view it as services
offered by the instances of this class... For example take a look at Number you have 'comparing', is a very generic service, so that any object can be in a set numbers have this property to have full order, so they offer a bit more than = and hash 'printing' a very generic Object protocol too for interacting (inspectors, debuggers...) 'arithmetic' is some more specialized service offered by numbers 'mathematical functions' too.
The category is a service for humans made by humans. The methods in e.g. "comparing" would work the same without a category. I think we can agree on the fact that relying on categories in code is mostly something not desirable.
If the classification helps a lot, IMHO it's not only related to the number of messages. It helps to declare/discover which service will be offered, and those can be completely transversal (printing vs comparing).
'private' has a value too, as there is no service to expect here...
So I have to disagree. I see these as essentials.
I did not decline that categories _can_ be useful and in fact they are. I'm also inclined to say that it is a good thing having all methods categorized in the distributed pharo image. So lint rules and such testing is good. But at the same time I don't see a point in enforcing it for everyone by choosing a stronger or even insulting term (at that point I decided to reply) for uncategorized methods.
Norbert
Nicolas
2013/1/30 Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name>:
Am 29.01.2013 um 16:57 schrieb Stéphane Ducasse < stephane.ducasse@inria.fr>:
Hi guys
I spend my time recategorizing methods.
I would like the change the intention of 'as yet unclassified' because this is a PLAGUE. It is like throwing papers on the floor. So we should have a different name to indicate that it should be fixed.
Any ideas?
'you are a dirty programmer - change me'
To be honest I have problems understanding why method categorization is so important. Often I don't care a single bit about categories because I don't understand them. I often categorize just to make lint happy :) What is the use? Declaring usage patterns? Declaring visibility? Use as method extensions marker? anything you like just classify? I can understand that it can help making the access of certain methods of a class easier. But that is particular true for classes with a lot of methods. Most of the classes are rather small. In most of my own developments I would consider most huge classes a design problem in my code. So I would try to fix that. And finally it is not easy to learn about them because the browser is not helping. If you browse through the methods of a class the category pane doesn't get updated. So even if I want to learn by getting used to them it is hard.
I would make the none categorized term weaker by naming it "uncategorizied" so at least I have the change to deliberately not categorizing my methods without being annoyed by someones opinion about what is essential.
my 2 cents,
Norbert
