Hi!
It's fantastic that Pragmatic Smalltalk makes such a good progress. :-)
Considering that a 1.0 release is a good time to take a first look at
a software, I think it would be a good idea to make sure it's really
polished for that so that the first impression for new developers is
positive. :-) When programming with Pragmatic Smalltalk, I still
usually come across language issues that aren't fixed yet, like e.g.
the 'integers as instance variables' issue I found yesterday, or the
segfault when -run only does '1 log.'.
Points I'd personally like to see in an ideal 1.0 release:
* Documentation explaining the deltas between "traditional" Smalltalk,
Pragmatic Smalltalk and Objective-C
* Issues like:
* What is a block and how do I use it?
* How do the type pragmas work?
* How does the automatic type conversion work?
* How to make objects respond to binary messages.
* This can make transition so much easier for potential new Etoile
developers! :-)
* More meaningful error messages
* Basic class libraries:
* Operators for the classes in FoundationKit and AppKit
* String concatenation, Set operations, Array concatenation etc
* These are really easy to write, but we should make sure each
of
them is a good idea. When people start to use it, it will be
harder
to change.
* More complete support for blocks in fundamental data structures.
* The relationship between BigInt, SmallInt (and NSNumber?): Can this
be arranged in a more meaningful way in the class hierarchy, so that
there's a common base class you can extend?
* General language usability:
* true and false should be defined
* hexadecimal escape characters in strings
* Preventing future backwards compatibility issues:
* Fix mapping between binary message names and ObjC message names,
even if not all of those mappings already work, a consistent naming
scheme
may prevent unnecessary complicated mapping code in future versions.
e.g. like prepending 'op' and replacing all '+' by 'Plus', '-' by
'Minus', '*' my 'Star' etc.
* Being careful with Smalltalkish extensions to the class library,
like discussed above
I'd suggest bumping it to 0.9 and then take some time to test it and
make sure it's a sound language for programmers to work in. Especially
in border cases like when sending messages to nil, Pragmatic Smalltalk
behaves differently to traditional Smalltalk dialects, which may make
it worth to do some design decisions right in the first place before
people pick it up and start to hack around these issues. ( nil =
anObject ifTrue: [ ... ]. What does this code do? :-> )
However, don't get me wrong, Pragmatic Smalltalk makes an amazing
progress! :-) I'm really optimistic that it can have a bit of an
impact when we get the initial 1.0 release right. :-)
Best regards,
Günther
On 6 Dec 2008, at 18:57, David Chisnall wrote:
> I opened up my 'list of things I wanted to have implemented before I
> called Smalltalk 1.0' and crossed off the ones that were done. Left
> on the list was... nothing.
>
> So, I would like to bump LanguageKit / SmalltalkKit up to the magic
> 1.0 for 0.4.1. The current version, however, almost certainly
> contains many bugs, which means that it needs testing before I do.
>
> David
>
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