[stcredzero]

4. Enums. My god, Enums. Such a simple feature, but so insanely welcome and useful in Rust.

Enums are so underrated. So many architecture problems introduced by bad coders in Smalltalk would have been entirely avoided with Swift style enums.

[detaro]

Can you give examples, assuming you are referring to patterns that still are somewhat common? I've seen a bunch of somewhat-connected Singletons used as enums with extra functionality in Smalltalk, is that the kind of thing you were thinking of?

[stcredzero]

Most of the times we couldn't do the refactorings/changes we wanted to, it was because we could only be 99.9% sure and not 100% sure someone didn't stick some goofy value somewhere to denote something special.

Also, I'm not so sure that Smalltalk as a language community and as a programming environment did what it took to get everyone to do the right thing. In Swift, it seems like the programmer would quickly learn that an enum is the right thing to do, and management would be on board with using it, because it's obviously the way you're supposed to do the thing. I could just hear one of my bosses saying, "Do you really need that? I don't want to hear about you delving into some sort of 'science project' where you could just stick a String there."

The quick and dirty way of doing things with "somewhat-connected Singletons used as enums" would be just to use the class hierarchy, and subclasses of a particular class would constitute one particular enum. But even with that, someone would have some sort of objection to it.

[detaro]

Interesting point about refactoring and "doing the right thing", didn't think about that angle, thanks for the reply!

[stcredzero]

You're welcome. The stuff that's actually important in production code over years is often something hard to think of ahead of time while looking at toy programming examples. And often, it involves what humans might do under deadlines.