On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 10:28 PM, Frank Shearar <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 7 January 2012 15:11, Nicolas Cellier
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 2012/1/7 Frank Shearar <[email protected]>:
>>> On 7 January 2012 14:14, Nicolas Cellier
>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> 2012/1/6 Lukas Renggli <[email protected]>:
>>>>> On 6 January 2012 11:20, Peter Hugosson-Miller <[email protected]> 
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> On 6 jan 2012, at 06:41, "Gerry Weaver" <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 2. There appear to be some tool choices in the Pharo image. I would like 
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> be able to create a class and it's methods in an editor in one go. I like
>>>>>> being able to see all of the class code at once. Is there a way to do 
>>>>>> this?
>>>>>>  I just want to be able to type it all in and accept (evaluate?) all at
>>>>>> once.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This is an interesting question to me personally. After 15 years of 
>>>>>> working
>>>>>> exclusively in Smalltalk I've recently been forced to start programming 
>>>>>> in
>>>>>> Java, where the source code is always (as far as I know) arranged in the 
>>>>>> way
>>>>>> you describe.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This organization just emphasizes the dead and compiled nature of Java 
>>>>>> (and
>>>>>> similar languages), compared to the living objects of Smalltalk, where 
>>>>>> even
>>>>>> methods are objects, created by sending messages to other objects. Source
>>>>>> code is relegated to being a mere artifact, which can be saved and 
>>>>>> organized
>>>>>> in any way one wishes, and preferably never shows its ugly face to the 
>>>>>> coder
>>>>>> :-p
>>>>>
>>>>> Which of course is no argument why Smalltalk code could not be
>>>>> displayed in a more programmer friendly way as a continuous block of
>>>>> text. There is no technical reason why source ranges in text box
>>>>> couldn't correspond to life method objects. Compared to other
>>>>> languages it is extremely tedious in Smalltalk to get an overview over
>>>>> a project, a package, or even a single class or to navigate between
>>>>> entities.
>>>>>
>>>>>> And yes, I really *really* miss a good, object oriented class browser!
>>>>>
>>>>> Eclipse is pretty good, especially with the Java Browsing Perspective.
>>>>>
>>>>> Lukas
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> As soon as you would display the code for many methods in a single text 
>>>> pane,
>>>> you will find file-based-educated people making large refactorings in
>>>> a single pass...
>>>> Imagine this leads to many syntax errors, they will soon be willing to
>>>> save their changes for a later rework...
>>>> This would be a complete change in programming flow and if we really
>>>> want to support this, we would have to:
>>>> - add a way to save syntactically incorrect code
>>>> - let IDE tools work on partially correct code (syntax highlighting,
>>>> navigation, etc...)
>>>>
>>>> IMHO, these features add a lot of complexity... Is it really worth?
>>>> I like the discipline of focusing on a single method until it is at
>>>> least syntactically correct.
>>>
>>> The Pharo community has extremely limited resources so it seems quite
>>> fair to me for Pharo to say "yes, but it's up to you because we have
>>> no time". It _is_ very useful to be able to see and edit long reams of
>>> text: my favourite text editor's been beaten on since the late 70s. It
>>> is now very, very good at manipulating text, in multiple programming
>>> languages, in multiple human languages, on many platforms. That I
>>> can't use this text editor to manipulate a textual representation of
>>> my favourite language is extremely annoying!
>>>
>>> frank
>>
>> Yeah, but my take was that re-inventing a very narrow subset of these
>> 40 years old text editors in Smalltalk would likely be a failure...
>> (or a big project)
>
> It would be a fairlly big piece of work although we do have lots of
> pieces lying around:
> * Coral's working on a scripting/REPL-like interface,
> * the Common Lisp community has been using SLIME to provide a REPL to
> a running image for years while also using files to store their code,
> * we have Gitocello (which also translates Squeak/Pharo to gst),
> * we have LanguageBoxes (*) allowing us to permit craziness like
> storing code outside the image in one format without affecting the
> entire language (letting us store Smalltalk code in something other
> than chunk format)
>
> (*) watch this space: I'm making progress on breaking up the Helvetia
> image into a bootstrappable bunch of packages

Did you commit your code somewhere ?

Regards,
-- 
Serge Stinckwich
UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC), Hanoi, Vietnam
Matsuno Laboratory, Kyoto University, Japan (until 12/2011)
http://www.mechatronics.me.kyoto-u.ac.jp/
Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
http://doesnotunderstand.org/

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