From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2002-01-15T04:56:40+09:00
Subject: RE: Small Methods - a ramble

> From: Brian Marick [mailto:marick@visibleworkings.com]
> Sent: Monday, January 14, 2002 10:19 AM
>
> To me - maybe an interpretive community of one - the physical arrangement
> of code is important. If two methods have something to do with
> each other,
> I put them close together. It usually means something significant if two
> classes share a file. Browser technology has something to do with
> this - I
> semi-consciously try to arrange methods so that you can grasp some whole
> story using two Emacs windows and a little scrolling, because that's the
> easiest way to use Emacs - but that's not all there is to it. I think
> physical arrangement gives cues that senders/implementers
> browsing doesn't,
> and that's probably a consequence of being conscious of files in a way
> Smalltalk programmers aren't. I sometimes explicitly think of a
> source file
> as a story being told to a new reader about the code, a story intended to
> be read linearly first time through. (And the first thing I do
> when reading
> someone else's code is scan through files linearly, just looking for
> interesting things at all levels of detail. That feels quite
> different than
> looking at a class in the Smalltalk browser.)

This is precisely, why I like the hybrid approach of having the edit window
hold entire files while a separate navigation pane shows the logical
hierarchy in a collapsible tree outline. I think this does a reasonable good
job of handling both approaches to code viewing/browsing.

If you don't mind, I'm going to copy the entire text of your posting to the
FreeRIDE wiki as I believe that you articulated this very well and I would
like to capture these thoughts.

Curt