On 16 January 2012 09:59, Lawson English <lenglish5@cox.net> wrote:
On 1/15/12 6:44 PM, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
On 1/15/2012 6:55 AM, Gerry Weaver wrote:
Hi Andreas,
I am not comfortable with the idea to write parts of an application in different languages. Typically the disadvantages overweigh the advantages to do so as you would have different languages and systems to master and update. Interoperability with other systems and languages should be easy and Squeak/Pharo are still lacking in this area. This is well known and hopefully there will be some improvements in the future.
I guess I would have to disagree with you here. Most of the editors and IDEs of other languages are not maintained by the language proper. There are many editors and IDEs that support many languages in addition to the one they are written in. I think the benefits of using a full featured GUI toolkit to create an IDE would be significant.
And I have to disagree with you here. You lack the imagination and knowledge to understand the significant advantage of having a single language, environment and toolset that Smalltalk provides.
I agree that there is an advantage to having a unified IDE/environment/etc, but Smalltalk IS stuck in the past in that it doesn't take advantage of multiple cores. I'm not talking about multi-threading in the usual sense, but things like the ability to debug one image from another so that the errors that pop up in the application under development don't affect the environment being used TO development that application. This issue pops up most obviously when trying to debug Cobalt/Croquet in a multi-user configuration, but arises all the time, especially when external libraries (e.g. OpenGL) are being used and errors occur that the current toolset isn't designed to accommodate.
We need to develop better ways of doing things, both for individual and collaborative environments. IOW, we need spoon and teatime and various other solutions to mature and work together.
If only we knew some folks working on the problem... http://marcusdenker.de/publications/Casa09aObjectSpaces.pdf :) Of course, there's a bit of elbow grease required to turn a research topic into a production-ready system. frank