Well oh Well, Python is stupid.... Very, very stupid To my suprise live coding in Python its actually easier to what I expected and almost the same, from user perspective to that of pharo.Minus the IDE conveiniece of course. But a pain in the hat to find the proper way to do it.
I was reloading modules, was thining of implementing become to python , which basically means replacing references to old instance object with references to new objects , then I thought that it would be more efficient to just reference the new methods to the instances and after a TON of testing I realized this is dead simple and for some reason python hides it very well. All the above were completely unecessary. Insance methods are referencing functions in the class object. Apparently functions in a class are taken as class methods and functions with self as first argument are considered instance methods. Which means I just copy paste the code of the method to the debugger, and assign it back to the existing live class and all instances are updated automagically. No need for become, no need to update instances manually no need to even reload the module. Similarly you can delete methods and add methods on the fly always live. Renaming a method is basically deleting and assigning . Renaming the class is the same. As is for class and instance variables. So anything can change on the fly. Names are there for your pleasure, in the end all that matters are the references.Its objects all the way down. The equivelant of a python instance method defiition and live updae , the python way, on Pharo would be MyClass instanceMethodName:= myMessage firstArg:self arg2: foo1 arg3: foo2.... |locals| code stuff and you python "call it" or message it MyClass insanceMethodName arg2:foo1 arg3: foo2 , no need to use self when calling it. Self is automatically passed because from the definition python knows this is suppose to be an insance method. or you could put a block after the assigment , because the name of the message is assigned by the assignment anyway, for class method you ommit the first argument of self. Calling is the same. This replaces a method or adds it if does not exist. All instances of that live class are immediately poitining to the new method. So the class is basically a collection of references. So all I have to do now is to wrap the copy paste and assignment in a single shortcut or button and I am ready to fly to live coding land. Days wasted chasing my tail but at least I learned a lot about python objects which are basically dictionaries objects (for variables) plus function objects (for class and instance methods) wrap inside an object, or rather referenced, called a class. Storing the live state , similar to fuel, is supported by the pickle library. Why on earth python made it so hard something so simple to understand ? no idea .I dont even need to make a live coding enviroment library as I assumed, its already there, hiding under the cover too scared to come out. Now I know why none or almost none does live coding in Python.
