Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality wrote:
> <ara.t.howard / noaa.gov> wrote in message
> news:Pine.LNX.4.62.0608221432440.21284 / harp.ngdc.noaa.gov...

-snip-
> > i guess what i'd offer is that mechanisms like
> >
> >   - explicit typing
> >   - documentation
> >   - introspection (as in runtime debugging)
> >   - static typing
> >   - clear coding conventions
> >
> > all contribute to code understanding and that many of these features are
> > available to ruby and not, for example, c and vise-versa.  if someone
> > leaves
> > you with no tools then it's just bad code!  ;-)
>
>     Yeah, I'm not surprised that this might be one of those "what can you
> do?  Life is hard..." problems.  I was just throwing this out there in case
> it was interesting and that, maybe, someone might have a surprising
> solution or approach to this issue...

Another mechanism - IDE support.

The most basic Smalltalk code exploration builds on tools for browsing
implementors/senders of methods. We'd browse all implementors of "parse
data, machine" to see if we were dealing with a massively polymorphic
method, and then we'd browse all senders of "parse data, machine" and
keep tracing back to see what sort of things "data.index 0" was being
initialized with.