On 8 October 2012 22:28, Camillo Bruni <camillobruni@gmail.com> wrote:
Being told so many times.. People still keep missing the point. Smalltalk is not just source code it is environment of live objects. Good luck manipulating live objects in emacs.
Please show me a live object in a Browser. Please. No, not a textual representation of a computation. Oh, that's right, you are STILL writing source code prior to compiling. Fail.
It is , of course up to you, If you prefer to code in stone age. I, personally cannot code outside image, without browser , debugger and such..
That's a strawman. I WANT a debugger, I WANT inspectors. I also WANT a proper top level syntax and the ability to use the thousands of tools that everyone else in the WHOLE WORLD takes for granted. OK, I've exceeded my capital letter quota for the day. (Also, clearly you've never used SLIME. I know this because SLIME lets you do everything you could want to, because it queries a real live running system to get its information. And guess how the Lispers store their source code? In text files, in git.
shhh, that are no objects! how dare you storing smalltalk in git!
I have seen zero reason in my, er, 13 years of Smalltalk, why we shouldn't enter source code in a proper text editor, with source properly stored in files on a disk. Yes, I want to live inside a running system as much as possible - not all the time, not being forced to do so because we lack the tools - but as much as possible. But source code is not a live object, it is text. And text should be munged by text tools, and stored in text files, and kept in a text-friendly source control system.
but, but we have the fancied multi-media development environment. Plus we feature the greatest text editor with shortcuts only 1% of the developers know.
... and those who know, keep their knowledge in secret :)
What else do you think bootstrapping is all about? It's taking some tiny system, and making a recipe to lift that bootstrap, and that recipe is not a living object, it is a specification, and it's written in text.
Smalltalk is wonderful, and the reason I still hack in it is because I can find nothing else that comes close to its sense of aliveness and engagement, and I nearly cry when I see the community reject things because of some strange ideology with the result that we end up lost in the dark.
Anyway. When I have something to show, I'll talk more on this topic. please!!
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.