From: Stéphane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr> Subject: Re: [Pharo-dev] poolDictionaries removal breaks my projects Date: 2 Feb 2014 00:30:04 GMT+1 To: Pharo Development List <pharo-dev@lists.pharo.org> 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

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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.

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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