On 13 Jun 2014, at 06:53, Tudor Girba <tudor@tudorgirba.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 11:31 AM, Matthew Chadwick <post@celeriac.net> wrote:
hello,

It's interesting that in Smalltalk, coding is still done via a text editor, not by sending messages to objects (except in the background, parsing & compiling etc). I've been playing with coding by messaging nodes in the AST with a view to coding this way via Roassal graph visualizations of object dependencies combined with some nice graphical tools. Has any work on this way of coding been done before ? What I have in mind is a keyboard-centric, fast system designed as an alternative to the text editor, with a focus on top-down style coding.


The direction to not use text but objects for code is very interesting� a lot of nice experiments could be done on top of this. 

One direction is to use more structured ways of editing� but one needs to take care that in the past (end of the 80ties) all the tries of structured editors
where not really successful. But having an AST like representation instead of text would not preclude to have an editor interface that provided both the
flexibility of a text editor with the knowledge and power of a real object representation of code below� very interesting direction.

Marcus