Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)

Re:Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981) by stcredzero on Thursday February 09, 2017 @09:15PM (#13612780)

There were some insider events called Camp Smalltalk clustered around the year 2000, where people were saying to each other that we lost the battles, lost the war, but we won our cause. So many of the ideas that went into Smalltalk became mainstream. Java and then C#/DotNet was the validation of that. People continued to say this at other conferences.

Consider that IDEs are becoming every more tightly integrated with their their client programming languages

You should take a look at Smalltalk "IDEs" some time. There's hardly anything there! The meta level is so easy to access, along with the compiler. The debugger is mostly just an ordinary Smalltalk application. In VisualWorks, a good coder can start writing a debugger and be browsing stack frames from real exceptions, literally within minutes. A warty but fully workable Class Browser could be finished by one coder in a week. There is no "tight integration" with the language. It just seems that way because almost everything is just an ordinary first class Object.

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Re:Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981) by noblethrasher on Thursday February 09, 2017 @09:28PM (#13612826)

> You should take a look at Smalltalk "IDEs" some time.

I've been delightedly toying with Squeak, Pharo, and Dolphin (as well as GNU Smalltalk, which is an anti-example, of course) for some time.

I cope with my day job by pretending that SQL Server is a Smalltalk.

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Re:Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981) by stcredzero on Friday February 10, 2017 @12:31PM (#13617138)

We had a nice discussion about this at Camp Smalltalk back in the day. In Smalltalk, everything is an Object, and we even use Objects to define Objects. In a proper relational server, everything is a table, and the tables are themselves defined using tables. SQL database servers are also very dynamic and everything is changeable at runtime, until you start restricting things. Even that last part is parallel to Smalltalk.

There are some things you can do as an advanced VisualWorks developer that look like queries of the codebase. You can search on one predicate like "sender of #message:" and take the intersection of that with another search, and have that pop up as a custom browser.

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