I was thinking about a number of things in the shower this morning and
then it occurred to me that it would be interesting to create a shell
environment INSIDE a Smalltalk vm.
It wouldn't be a complete environment, but it would include a small set
of standard unix utilities:
- awk
- sed
- grep
the "directory structure" would be the package structure in the image
(or maybe multiple views on the image contents) with the basic idea that
you 'cd' into a class where there is a 'file' that contains the class
attributes. you then 'cd instance/all' and you are in a "directory" of
methods where you can 'vi at:put:' and have a vi-like editor come up on
the source of the at:put: method of course awk, grep, and sed work on
all of these 'source files'... there would be 'executable files' that
are simply workspaces ...
I know that folks have externalized files, but I don't know if anyone
has internalized the shell environment ...
The reason for internalizing the shell is that it becomes easy to
transition to the debugger and other traditional browsers/windows.
The big reason for internalizing the shell is to provide a unix-like
interface for Smalltalk that might make transition to the Smalltalk
tools easier for folks new to Smalltalk.
The secondary reason (and probably just as important) for internalizing
the shell, is that the hard-core Smalltalk developers might actually
find some utility in using the "smalltalk shell" in the normal course of
development and if hard-core developers use it, it will be maintained
and might lead to other interesting things...
The idea is that the entire "smalltalk shell" would be implemented in
Smalltalk so you could bring up browsers with a command ...
I've been thinking wistfully back to the days when I lived inside of
Emacs in the days before every terminal had a mouse ... back then I put
my hands on the keyboard at the start of the day and they stayed there
the entire day all window navigation was done via the keyboard ... I
lost all of that once I started doing development in Smalltalk...
Anyway that about covers todays "ideas from the shower"...
Dale
