Re:The one about Lisp interactivity
by Barrin92 on Friday November 11, 2022 @03:37PM
(#33566465)
Smalltalk only got a mention in the footnotes but I think it deserves a bigger entry when talking about ways to interact with programs. If a REPL is talking to and conversing with a program then environments like Pharo take it a step further by letting you interactively and graphically look under the hood as well. It's an amazing way to interact with software once you get used to it and I think well worth checking out if only for fun. https://pharo.org/
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And we can even talk about back in time debugging such as https://github.com/hpi-swa-lab/squeak-tracedebugger
Similar to a Lisp REPL / Listener is in Smalltalk the Workspace, in Pharo the Playgound.
everybody should watch this talk by Tudor Girba on Moldable Development ... https://youtu.be/Pot9GnHFOVU
In todays world a distinction between Smalltalk and a Lisp listener is remote connectivity. Lisp needs a simple socket, whereas Smalltalk requires the full GUI.
I can certainly be mistaken but I don’t know if you can connect a typical modern Smalltalk workspace to a remote image. Nothing to stop someone from whipping up a straightforward socket listener to a ST image, but it’s not at all the same thing as what the desktop experience is.
Obviously not impossible just a distinction between them.
ST also solves the disparity between the image and the source code by logging all changes made to an image automatically. So it’s straightforward to roll forward an older image to a recent state by replaying the changes file.
> connect a typical modern Smalltalk workspace to a remote image
It nearly happened: