[hota_mazi]

> > (and yes, that includes Smalltalk IDE's)

> Patently false.

It's a mathematical fact.

Without type annotations, refactorings are never safe and need supervision from a human.

Did you notice that the "Refactoring Browser" calls itself just that, not "Automatic"?

Because it can't provide that guarantee. Even renaming a function is dangerous and can break a program when you don't have type annotations.

I have a lot of respect for Smalltalk and the pioneering work it accomplished, but the refactoring browser was just a powerful string replacement engine, nothing more. Which is not a knock on the engineers and scientists who invented it: it simply, mathematically, could not do more than that.

[mpweiher]

> Without type annotations, refactorings are never safe

There is a difference between "I can prove this is safe" and "this is safe". You guys need to start figuring out the difference between theory and practice.

[dahauns]

In practice, "this is safe" often transforms to "I thought this was safe" at the most inopportune moment.

[mpweiher]

Nope, your theory says it should. In practice it doesn't.