[ARTICLE] Tiny, yet so beautiful

Here is my response to some of the comments on the article (published with the article itself):

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@Bert

Ah, my mistake. I did obviously check several implementations but the fact that the abstract method did not exist on Boolean itself misled me, weird. In any case, the two methods on True and False have indeed a 2004 timestamp, but the unit test has a 2009 timestamp, weird again. There is no further history to be found there.

The method is also totally unused in your base image, unlike in Pharo.

Cuis which forked in 2009 (after Pharo) does not have this method, also weird.

Now, the article is not about digital archeology, but about a tiny piece of beautiful code.

I rephrased some sentences to correct my mistake.

@Tim

No need for conspiracy theories, it was a mistake and was corrected.

It is wonderful how certain people think they invented or are the keepers of all things Smalltalk while they got everything from Smalltalk-80 that came before them and while many other successful Smalltalk implementations existed and continue to exist.

Pharo forked in 2008, that is a long time ago. Get over it. We are not looking backwards, we are looking forwards.

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(more below)

> On 10 Mar 2016, at 15:24, Henrik Johansen <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 10 Mar 2016, at 3:01 , Peter Uhnák <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> "Nice article. But asBit has existed in @SqueakSmalltalk since at least 2004. Why not say so?"
>> https://twitter.com/bertfreudenberg/status/707922868273856512
>>
>> And indeed, in Pharo I see it added on 27.3. and 28.12.2012 (why almost a year difference?)
>>
>> And in Squeak I see it added 1.7.2004 (although they don't have it in Boolean class).
>>
>> The rest of the Boolean class looks pretty identical to the letter (including comments), so it makes one wonder why wasn't this copied over.
>>
>> Peter
>
> It was, the same version of asBit you find in Squeak was present in Pharo 1.4 and earlier.
> Though, uncategorized, and without the subclassResponsibility implementation on Boolean.

Apparently (I did not look that far back initially).

> 2.0 development was hectic, hard to tell if it was cleaned away and then re-added/invented ( I think it may have, I seem to remember it being an extension in NB for awhile)
> The source compaction that happened at 2.0 release removed any lingering traces of the old version, either way attributing Anthony Hannan as well wouldn't be entirely out of place.

Yes, sometimes changes were quite heavy.

The problem is also that the 'author' of a method's source code is not necessarily who wrote it; reformatting, commenting, changing the category are all ways to overwrite that tag. Even the first one in the chain could have gotten it from somewhere else, originally.

If it was Anthony Hannan like you say, then well done Anthony !

> Either way, a beautiful bit of code!

That was the point (and I now see that you used it in the Unicode project, so you knew it already !).

> Cheers,
> Henry

Sven