Postings by Michael in September 2009
Why Squeak is not the answer, part 2
Error handling (or god forbid, exception handling) is one of the weak parts in Squeak. A great deal of course comes from its dynamically typed nature. However, the greater impact probably comes from the utter lack of guard clauses in most core librares I've seen so far: Objects will happily accept any kind of parameter and continue to wrack havoc on them until the debugger, at some later point (IF we are lucky), stops the travesty.
Let's move on to BitBlits, where the lack of parameter checking and the absence of proper initialization quickly crashes your VM. Why use BitBlits at all? Because Morphics are crap. More precisely, they feature:
- poor performance (I guess all the redrawing with overlapping Morphic instances doesn't come for free),
- a hideously complex class hierarchy
- undocumented models (say, the model ...
