Mastodawn

The Smalltalk System Browser has survived for 40 years.
That’s not an accident: it solves the context problem extremely well.
But the real friction in modern Smalltalk may lie elsewhere: the lack of composition between IDE tools.
Some thoughts ↓

https://blog.lorenzano.eu/smalltalks-browser-unbeatable-yet-not-enough/

#Smalltalk #Pharo #Programming cc @pharoproject

Smalltalk’s Browser: Unbeatable, Yet Not Enough

The four-pane System Browser has shaped Smalltalk development for forty years. It’s still brilliant at providing context. But the real problem may not be the browser itself—it may be the lack of composition between the tools that surround it.

MIND MAP

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Kirtai 🏳️‍⚧️Mar 5

@estebanlm @pharoproject
I remember using the Whisker Browser on Squeak many years ago. That was a very different window into the system.

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Esteban Lorenzano Mar 5

@kirtai @pharoproject yes, whisker browser had very good ideas on it, I liked it a lot.

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akavel Mar 5

@estebanlm I think the "Code Bubbles" idea/prototype from some time ago was intended to help keep an "investigation trail", no?

https://cs.brown.edu/people/spr/codebubbles/indexold.html

(for screenshots, see at the bottom of the page)

Honestly speaking, I'm not really sure why it didn't stick; from time to time I wish I had it available (though admittedly I also never tried to run it... so not sure what are the drawbacks...)

Code Bubbles Home Page

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Marcel Weiher Mar 5

@estebanlm @pharoproject

If you haven't seen:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47258885

Smalltalk's Browser: Unbeatable, yet Not Enough | Hacker News

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Liam Proven Mar 5

@estebanlm @pharoproject

I am not a Smalltalk expert by means, but I must ask: have you looked at Gilad Bracha's Newspeak project?

https://bracha.org/Site/Newspeak.html

https://newspeaklanguage.org/index.html

It seems to me that it addresses a number of the core issues around Smalltalk and its development environment, but I do not know much about it.