さき
mccWait why is the GNU Smalltalk reference documentation written in the first person
https://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual-base/html_node/Collection.html
Jordan
David JONES@mcc i am Smalltalk's medula oblongata
curtosis has moved (see bio)@mcc become:oneOfUs.
yaoi gagarin@mcc is the answer "user stories"
Cassandra is only carbon now@mcc Someone talking self too seriously?
mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)
mega
Random Geek@randomgeek @atax1a I don't think I can maintain a consistent form even when talking about myself in first person. I don't expect anything better if I tried to talk about other people or non-people in first person 😅.
Aeáro, a SeaWyrm 
Are we all, all of our selves, truly abstract? These day-to-day implementations of us no true, direct instances of our selves, our real selves, which at no point actually exist?
Do we all have unimplemented methods - vital to our identity, yet hollow, without form or substance? Promises of identity left unanchored, unspecified, detached and dreamlike?
"Musty Bits" McGee
Remind Me@arichtman Ok, I will remind you on Wednesday Aug 20, 2025 at 8:43 PM UTC.
@arichtman Here is your reminder!
Alexander The 1st
m.c. C-27733 [lily] 
@mcc here , changed it to third person :
This one is an abstract class. Its instances are collections of objects. This ones subclasses may place some restrictions or add some definitions to how objects are stored and organized; This one says nothing about this. It merely provides some object creation and access routines for general collections of objects
Lars Fosdal@mcc It has become sentient?
DistroWatch@mcc I am Smalltalk's cold sweat.
Bjornsdottirs@mcc Hello, I am a toaster. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-426
Kraftwerk-Das Model Collapse@bjornsdottirs @mcc nice to meet you, I'm a teapot
@dngrs @bjornsdottirs *speaking into microphone on lapel* yes, we have a code 418 on chaos.social
Tobias@mcc It's a Smalltalk tradition found even in the earliest sources
https://github.com/pablomarx/AltoST80/blob/master/st80src/sources.st#L1103
https://github.com/pablomarx/AltoST80/blob/master/st80src/sources.st#L1103
Siroj42@krono @mcc I'm working on a long-running software project (in Java) for university, and one of the people who first wrote it must have really liked this style, because it's all over the Javadoc comments. Didn't know it was a Smalltalk thing, I think I'll ask someone if that person had worked with Smalltalk before.
the vessel of morganna@mcc self aware programming language
morgan
Mark Reid@mcc That’s odd but kind of charming. That change of style must of happened post Smalltalk-80 because the Blue Book does not use first-person comments.
Christa 
@mcc Don't use GNU Smalltalk. It's not very good. The good free Smalltalk is Squeak or one of its forks (Pharos or Cuis.)
(Sorry if you already know that; I had a NOOOOOOOOOO reaction when I read that.)
@christa That's helpful, thank you.
the_wiz@the_wiz Little Smalltalk is a toy and nothing else. I've never gotten it to run a non-trivial program. Its primitives don't sanitize argument types so you can easily trash memory from Smalltalk, and development is done exclusively by launching vi on one method at a time.
GNU Smalltalk lets you use an editor in the usual way, but input files are in the interchange format and syntax errors will break things in hard-to-diagnose ways. I had slightly better luck with it, but Smalltalk is not designed to be developed via the usual editor+textfile process and GST made no accommodations to support that. You're still supposed to use the GUI-based browser/workspace system which, unfortunately, does not exist. It's also slow.
Squeak is the only free Smalltalk I've ever successfully used to do anything useful. It will run headless and I've used it for web apps that way. You could probably also do console I/O, tho you'll need to use the FFI to do it and you'd still need the GUI for development.
Also: first-person class comments are a thing in PARC Smalltalk, presumably because it tries to have a happy-friendly-buddy vibe. One of the big initial use cases for the Alto was to teach children.
Randy Smith@mcc You've got something against self-documenting code?
Dan Cassidy 🦌@mcc Smalltalk invented everything that was terrible about mainstream software development for three decades, so it shouldn't be a surprise that they also invented some terrible things that didn't catch on.
Drew
Richard Hendricks@mcc I am the very model of a modern major general...
Glyph@mcc @0xabad1dea all smalltalks do this; the idea is that each class speaks for itself, in the code as “self” and in the documentation as me/I. Twisted tried to adopt this idiom (my dad was a smalltalk programmer in the 80s, and it rubbed off a bit) but everyone else objected so much that it never caught on. I still wish it had.
@mcc @0xabad1dea should have called it subject oriented programming am I right
(This is a joke about the social construction of subjectivity, if you don’t like Foucault please keep scrolling)
armadillosoft@mcc Early Borland Pascal manual taught you how to program in Pascal and to use the compiler and tools by telling you the story of - i may not have this exactly right - a prospector and his mule named Daisy.
Great literature in the service of revolutionary technology.
Pxl Phile@mcc my take is that Smalltalk isn't object- but rather subject-oriented. That may help with anemic class syndrome because of a stronger identification with the developer
PulkoMandy@mcc that would make sense for online documentation in a Smalltalk system, you would probably send a "whoAreYou" message to any class and get that kind of reply. And rewriting it in third person for a printed (or html) manual would be a lot of unnecessary work?
AlexB@mcc I am Jake's collection of objects.
⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe@mcc I think this is quite clever, if it was written at the time when OOP was new; it enourages you to think of a class as an independant entity you ask to do things
technosophist@mcc If it avoids passive voice, then I'm for it!
Kaito@mcc Wait that's actually smart and creative.