This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Traits Support in Ruby, Squeak Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Ruby Developers now have traits support - something Squeak has had for awhile. Traits are described here. There's an interesting comment on ease of development with traits in the article:

Despite that, I'm still not sold on the Traits concept. I'm not sure that sprinkling methods over a distributed set of Mixins would be fun to maintain, on a large scale. The Squeak implementation took advantage of the browser: you only ever see one method at a time in Squeak (smalltalk) code, anyway, and if the browser integrates with Traits, you could view and edit the methods as "part" of the class anyway. With Ruby, without a great IDE, you'd need to flick across files and use a bit of imagination to get a good "view" of your composed class - to even see what methods it's composed of. I believe that traits lose a good deal of their appeal without the Smalltalk browser, or a great Trait-aware IDE.

Interesting that he likes traits in Squeak better, due to the IDE support - one of my issues with traits - or method level namespaces - has been the whole dveloper presentation/understandability issue. It looks like I should grab Squeak and take a look, so that my preconceptions can be addressed with some actual data points :)