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11.1 Golden Rules of the Smalltalk Guild

Basic questions, that appear to be the golden rules of the Smalltalk intergalactic guild²⁹:

• Are methods short and understandable?
• Does a line of code read like a sentence?
• Do method names say what they do, rather than how they do it?
• Do class and instance variable names indicate their role(s)?
• Are there useful class comments?
• Can we make something simpler? Leave something out?

Now, we have been doing Smalltalk code for a while and so tend to follow good practices, but let’s take another look at our code and see if we can make it easier for a reader to understand.