What scares you the most about the integrated IDE of most modern Smalltalks?

Question

As I'm riding the wave of resurgence of Smalltalk (especially because many Ruby-on-Rails people are rediscovering Smalltalk and seeing Seaside as their next upgraded web framework), I get questions like "yeah, but how do I use my favorite editor to edit Smalltalk code?" or "Does Smalltalk still insist on living in a world of its own?".

Now, having first experienced Smalltalk back in 1981, I don't understand these questions very well. It seems rather natural that I'd want the editor and debugger to be savvy of my current code state, and integrate with the change control system that is Smalltalk-aware. Using an external editor or debugger or change control manager would seem very awkward.

So what is it that scares you the most about not being able to edit the five-line methods in Smalltalk with your favorite editor, or use your favorite non-Smalltalk-aware change control system?

Answer 1

Everything's different. Want to go to the end of the line? It's not Ctrl-E. Want to jump a few words over, by word? It's not Meta-F....

Text editing is a fundamental programming activity. Messing with those inputs is messing with something deep in my mind.

Edit: and here is someone asking for emacs key bindings on comp.lang.smalltalk in 1987.

Answer 2

Nothing scares me in particular, but I found working out the API's in VW a bit of a chore, even when I had used other smalltalks. The effect of the browsers is that you tend to see the API's a little bit at a time and quite often it's not immediately obvious where you should look for particular functionality.

Smalltalk also suffers a bit from the paradigm shift to understand how it works. When I was doing my bachelor's degree at university (some time after I had first encountered Smalltalk) I got to enjoy a bit of Schadenfraude watching everyone else in the class getting over the initial paradigm hump as they learned the system (Squeak) for the first time.

I think the combination of the paradigm shift and functionality being somewhat buried in the class libraries makes for a bit of a steep learning curve. ST had a reputation for a fairly steep learning curve to really come up to speed - most of this is due to the large class libraries and the fact that most of the language functionality is buried somewhere in the libraries.

Also (and sadly), Java came along in the mid 1990s and grabbed all of the mindshare. The major Smalltalks have either died completely or been sold off to niche players. It's quite Ironic (in a happy way) that Ruby has served to re-awaken interest in Smalltalk but the lingering perception of 'also-ran' obsolescence doesn't help.

See This post of mine for some pontification about the merits (as I see them) of getting heavily involved in Smalltalk in this day and age.

I would be quite happy to go back into Smalltalk if the opportunity were to arise.

Answer 3

The one big show-stopper for me is that code I write one Smalltalk VM is STILL, after all these years, not compatible with other Smalltalk VMs.

I understand why that is: the core of Smalltalk is an extremely small set of axioms and keywords. This means that after 30 minutes of learning Smalltalk, you're already learning the API library rather than the language itself. I like that approach to language design.

What it all boils down to however, in the Smalltalk world, is that unless a consensus is reached between all VM vendors to have a common base Standard API, my Smalltalk code written for one VM is almost certain not to run on other VMs when I decide to switch.

This also has the corollary of obsoleting part of my knowledge of the space when I switch VMs.

Note that I have barely tried Smalltalk in my life. I'm far from being an expert. This understanding comes from speaking with James Robertson about a month ago.

Another point I'd like to make is that Seaside does in fact run on most popular Smalltalk VMs. I wonder how much of (what should have been) a Standard API they had to build for themselves to achieve that feat.

With all that said, I always have an ear out to hear more about the state of Smalltalk. I do want to try out Smalltalk's very powerful development environment (and its other goodies).

Answer 4

The only Smalltalk I've spent any time with is Squeak, so my views may not apply to other Smalltalk environments.

What concerns me about the image-based approach is that, while you have wonderful things in the Smalltalk environment, it is a walled garden that makes it difficult to interoperate with anything outside that environment. For example, what if I want to use external tools like Yacc and Lex? What if I want to use some C or Python programs to generate Smalltalk code? What if I want to mix Smalltalk in with a bunch of code written in other languages, editing code in all those languages in one editor and keeping it all stored in the same source-code tree?

I'm sure it's possible to deal with all these issues by having your Smalltalk environment invoke system functions to control external tools. But how easy is it to let external tools control your Smalltalk environment? In other words, what if I want Smalltalk to be just another component, rather than the master of everything?

Answer 5

While the restricted Smalltalk environment made things like relying on a database driven source control system possible at times where other languages still struggled with having a proper editor, it makes integration very hard in todays times.

With tools like Eclipse or Team Foundation Server you get so used to having all tools integrate with each other. E.g. if a requirement is created, it is automatically linked to the change sets that the programmer commits to implement that requirement. This "boundary breaking" between formerly different tools is nearly impossible in the Smalltalk world, but with bigger projects, bigger teams, higher levels of abstraction and so on you need tools which are more than a fancy editor and help you throughout a full software development life cycle.

Answer 6

For the Windows world, there is nothing like Dolphin Smalltalk. The IDE is fantastic. Another quality product if you want to try is Visualworks, it works well, has a very fast VM and the documentation is pretty good.

I've used both in the past, there is nothing to fear.

Answer 7

I know it's late but the biggest annoyance for me is that there is not really good editor in none of the smalltalks. It's a thing I can not understand. Working with text is so essential and that less "supported"....

It's always this just staring at one method and then you need to have some method finder or another browser around just to check another method. This is what I really dislike....

Answer 8

No useful support for navigating with the keyboard, or supporting platform UI behavior.

While it's true you don't really need an incredible text editor for (well-written) Smalltalk, being able to move around the environment while keeping your hands on the keyboard is quite useful (and in my case, essential to reducing RSI). I just was trying VisualWorks' inspector and the arrow keys didn't even work properly to move up and down a list. When I hit the space bar, I got a walkback. Sigh.