A Critique on Code Critics

Code critics are a recommendation facility of the Pharo Smalltalk IDE. They signal controversial implementation choices such as code smells at class and method level. They aim to promote the use of good and standard coding idioms for increased performance or a better use of object-oriented constructs. This paper studies relations among code critics by analyzing co-occurrences of code critics detected on the Moose system, a large and mature Smalltalk application. Based upon this analysis, we present a critique on code critics, as a first step towards an improved grouping of code critics that identifies issues at a higher level of abstraction, by combining lower-level critics that tend to co-occur, as well as improvements in the definition of the individual critics.