Hi,
It has been a while since I worked with an out-of-the-box VisualWorks
image and now I found myself quite surprised at the amount of comments
auto-generated by the code wizards. The UIDefiner ones have been
around for a while so I am used to deleting them wherever I change a
method but the comments in the #initiliaze I see first time... It made
me thing whether we are starting to suffer from the "dead furniture"
method overload?
I'm guessing that this has been introduced to let the newcomers find
the way around the system quicker but I find it mildly annoying. It
also seems to make the language/IDE a bit inelegant - where before it
was simple and minimalistic now starts looking very verbose and noisy.
I was wondering if there would be appetite for introducing the
Assistant-driven approach ("appetite" means I cannot offer help
writing such a thing ;-) ) - something "pioneered" (very badly) by
Microsoft with their Office Assistant, just implemented better. Say,
we can build something what can be wired into RefactoringBrowser which
can then instrument or enrich the displayed code on the fly providing
level of assistance as configured by the user. To use the #initialize
example it could present the method in the UI only instead of defining
a stub in the class's methodDict. It feels like having such concept
introduced would create new opportunities and generally drive towards
better IDE by encouraging people to treat it as a separate layer put
on top of the language itself rather than something what invades core
classes themselves...
Regards, Jaroslaw.
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