Opinionated Browsing

Ramon Leon explains that Smalltalk - like Ruby on Rails - is "opinionated software". Consider the browser:

Smalltalk’s browser is rather opinionated, luckily, thanks to Rails, opinionated software seems to be having somewhat of a revival. When it comes to writing code, the browser forces you into a certain mindset, one that other languages don’t force you into. When I create a method in Java/C#/Ruby, I have to choose little more than what file and class it belongs in. I *can* organize the code well, but there’s little incentive to do so and my unit of work is rather undefined, I could be slicing and dicing methods, classes, namespaces, etc., usually with the full screen devoted to code across various files or even god forbid in one giant file. This encourages a code now and organize later approach. Sadly, later often never comes, and the code is left functional but messy.

Smalltalk on the other hand, defines my unit of work as *the method* and by doing so forces me at every turn, to continually organize my code in semantically meaningful ways. When I create a method, I have to choose a class category, a class, and a method category to put the method in. If I don’t, Smalltalk kindly categorizes the method for me in a protocol called “as yet unclassified”. It’s almost an insult, but it’s also a not so subtle reminder than I’m writing code sloppily, faster than I’m thinking. It reminds me to slow down, think for a second, where does this thing belong.

Read the whole thing - explains a lot of the reasons that people taking a first look at Smalltalk have difficulty. Smalltalk's tools work in their own ways for their own reasons.

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