Relentless Repairability or Reckless Reuse: Whether or Not to Rebuild a Concern with ...
summary
Argues that rebuilding wins when you need liveness, debuggability and teachable code and gives concrete cases: a reimplemented Smalltalk font parser that lets users explore but still misses full Unicode and fallback stack, mouse-click handling that threatens 60 FPS yet can hit it with discipline, and VM plugins that boost rendering but break direct object inspection. Compares shipping JS modules (fast, huge community, closed VM quirks) versus maintaining repairable Smalltalk implementations and endorses a hybrid: reuse for stable black‑box concerns, rebuild when long‑term repairability matters.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Start
- 0:39Two Cultures, One Liveness
- 7:26Values and Practices (contd.)
- 8:27Research Question
- 9:04Our Tools and Materials
- 10:37Squeak/Smalltalk Programming System
- 11:15Conversation in Context
- 13:43The Exploratory Mindset (contd.)
- 14:27The Dilemma Revisited
- 15:33Anecdotal Perspectives
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