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A comment on Reviving Smalltalk-78: The First Modern Smalltalk Lives Again (2014) [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:Reviving Smalltalk-78: The First Modern Smalltalk Lives A... by cwp on Wednesday October 14, 2015 @12:45PM (#10387697)
> Yes, but very few of those are automated. Which is not surprising since the absence of types in Smalltalk can lead to refactorings that break your code, so user supervision is necessary.

This is just not true. Go download a copy of VisualWorks. Try a Squeak image with OmniBrowser installed. They both have IDEs with automated refactorings. I have used both. I have contributed to the OmniBrowser implementation.

What you say does apply to Ruby or Python. It does not apply to Smalltalk.

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Re:Reviving Smalltalk-78: The First Modern Smalltalk Lives A... by incepted on Thursday October 15, 2015 @01:52AM (#10391567)
> They both have IDEs with automated refactorings.

Yes but they do not guarantee correctness. They can't, the IDE simply doesn't have enough type information for that.

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Re:Reviving Smalltalk-78: The First Modern Smalltalk Lives A... by cwp on Thursday October 15, 2015 @02:42AM (#10391708)
As a matter of fact, they do. Unlike Java IDEs, Smalltalk dev tools are implemented via reflection on the running program. Between information available from the runtime data structures in the program and the fact that Smalltalk uses single dispatch polymorphism, static type declarations aren't necessary for correct automatic refactorings.

This will be my last post in this thread.

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Re:Reviving Smalltalk-78: The First Modern Smalltalk Lives A... by incepted on Thursday October 15, 2015 @10:22AM (#10393276)
> static type declarations aren't necessary for correct automatic refactorings.

They very much are, it's a scientific fact (look up the Curry-Howard isomorphism).

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Re:Reviving Smalltalk-78: The First Modern Smalltalk Lives A... by cwp on Thursday October 15, 2015 @04:01PM (#10395587)
Ah. An academic. Of course.
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Re:Reviving Smalltalk-78: The First Modern Smalltalk Lives A... by incepted on Thursday October 15, 2015 @10:12PM (#10397108)
No, a mere engineer who takes writing correct code very seriously.

But the simple fact you seem to throw the term "academic" derogatorily tells me a lot about you.

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