Proposal 6: Seaside stop lying to us!

Seaside seems designed and coded intentionally in a very cryptic style presumably with a goal to make it difficult for new users to understand it and to become productive without consultancy of specialists!

Here is another argument:

There are plenty of methods with extremely misleading names and this is, apart from the totally missing documentation, a main reason why it will be very difficult, labourious and time-consuming for new users to really understand and properly use Seaside!

Here is a perfect example:

In the class WARenderContinuation there is the method "newHtmlRoot:". From general Smalltalk conventions one would expect that this answers some new instance with data of the HTML root.

That is not false but not correct either, because unfortunately this method does a lot more: It starts a main generation loop through all child classes and sends them the very important message "updateRoot:"

When reading the message "newHtmlRoot" one would never expect that this factory method also immediately performs such important and vital actions, which are hidden behind a false name. In most libraries it is common practice to keep factory methods clean from such important actions.

I consider this extremely bad style and it makes me very angry that they are stealing my time with such highly individual and extremely uncommon bundling of functionalities behind false and lying method names! If at least they had given it some correct name like "newHtmlRootAndCollectFiles:" then I would just argue about this fancy but at least honest method name.

By the way: the method name "updateRoot:" is also a bad choice in my view. What it really does is collect references to script and css files etc, which are added to the new WAHtmlRoot instance that is created in newHtmlRoot:.

The semantics of "update" imply that some content is changed with some newer content (more "up-to-date"). This is not the case here. What happens is that some data is collected and added for the first time to that new instance. That is clearly not an update!

In my view, something like "collectFilesForRoot" or "initializeRootWithFiles" would be much clearer and much simpler to understand.

I would not discuss this if there were not many dozens of other wrong names. Nobody always and immediately finds the right words. That is why I regularly change ("update") method names when I see that they were not well selected or because their purpose and actions have changed over time.

I don't know why the authors of Seaside have made such a bullshit (remember: I promised open words and no false politeness)! I can only think of three reasons:

1) Either their goal was to sell their consultancy by making it hard for new users to become productive without external consultancy!

2) Maybe these people are verbally so limited in their capabilities of expressing their thoughts that they simply couldn't do any better. This would not be unusual for highly mathematical people and it is by no means any disqualification. I have never met anybody who is equally good in mathematical and in verbal logic. I myself have often my great problems with maths, for example, but never with open words.

3) Or these people are so self-assured and regards themselves so ingenious that they just give a shit on what other people think and don't understand.

I don't know but I would bet on a combination of the first and the third reason.

In any case, I think that these many substantial problems must be resolved quickly to make Seaside easily usable. Currently, this is unfortunately not the case.

For a quick start it would help a lot if all classes and methods had clear and concise documentation inside the code.

Unfortunately, there is almost nothing!