Friedrich Dominicus wrote:
"joe" <joe.moore@gmail.com> writes:
> Hi all --
>
> I shout my question to the entire Ruby + Smalltalk community: Smalltalk
> has had amazing IDEs for decades, why not Ruby? Smalltalkers, Ruby
> needs your help!
Are you willing to pay for it?
There is no such thing as free, so the distinction between paying and
not paying does not exist. With FOSS, the price is community effort,
including effort by the user.
There's an issue that I think is more significant, which is that Smalltalk's
model is that all the classes and objects are there, all the time, in the image.
Ruby's model is that the classes are NOT there, but are brought in (via require)
only when the need is explicitly expressed in the source code.
As such, a Smalltalk-style experience is very difficult to produce. Chet
Hendrickson and I tried, and while we're not the best in the world, we're good
enough to be sure it's difficult.
I'd love to see someone do it, but it's not going to be easy, in my opinion.
On 5 Jul 2006 15:11:16 -0700, hanumizzle@gmail.com wrote:
Friedrich Dominicus wrote:
"joe" <joe.moore@gmail.com> writes:
> Hi all --
>
> I shout my question to the entire Ruby + Smalltalk community: Smalltalk
> has had amazing IDEs for decades, why not Ruby? Smalltalkers, Ruby
> needs your help!
Are you willing to pay for it?There is no such thing as free, so the distinction between paying and
not paying does not exist. With FOSS, the price is community effort,
including effort by the user.
--
Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
I'm giving the best advice I have. You get to decide if it's true for you.
Hello Ron,
There's an issue that I think is more significant, which is that Smalltalk's
model is that all the classes and objects are there, all the time, in the image.
Ruby's model is that the classes are NOT there, but are brought in (via require)
only when the need is explicitly expressed in the source code.
Yes this is a problem, but it is more a coding style problem.
At the moment nobody has such an IDE and therefore people do pretty
ugly stuff during load time. Again the worst example is the tk toolkit
wrapper.
But there is no need for it, most of it is just programmer lazyiness.
As such, a Smalltalk-style experience is very difficult to produce. Chet
Hendrickson and I tried, and while we're not the best in the world, we're good
enough to be sure it's difficult.
I'd love to see someone do it, but it's not going to be easy, in my opinion.
I thought about this too (well, i get paid for doing this :-).
And i don't think it's so difficult to implement something that is
getting closer to Smalltalk. But i'm not really sure if this will
increase productivity very much, because i believe it is wasting a lot
of time playing with things instead organized programming with writting
test cases. It's just a different way to do things - but this is
left for each one/project to decide what style to choose.
The only problem that you can't solve is that there is no image.
But i believe this is not really important. It's much more about
interactivity (inspector) and the good code browsing of a Smalltalk
System.
I did a little bit lisp programming in the past and the
image was nothing that i would add to the killer features.
Sadly too many people are black-and-white minded. They want this
and exactly this behaviour and having trying to do it exactly
like Smalltalk is impossible.
--
Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com
CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's
I'd love to see someone do it, but it's not going to be easy, in my opinion.
I thought about this too (well, i get paid for doing this :-).
And i don't think it's so difficult to implement something that is
getting closer to Smalltalk. But i'm not really sure if this will
increase productivity very much, because i believe it is wasting a lot
of time playing with things instead organized programming with writting
test cases. It's just a different way to do things - but this is
left for each one/project to decide what style to choose.
Well, I've worked in many languages, including Smalltalk and Ruby,
and I was way more productive in Smalltalk. I think that's the
general impression that people have who have done both.
Some of that productivity is surely in the language syntax, but I'd
think that was only a small part of it.
In Smalltalk, I can see the source code of any method available. I
can set a breakpoint in it, step through it, change it if I want to.
In Ruby, as it stands now, we don't even know what all the source
code is going to be, nor what it is now.
If we built a whole new Ruby system, that could be resolved. In
terms of an IDE on top of existing Ruby, I think it would be more
difficult. I'd expect it to wind up looking like Visual Studio, C#,
but without all the type definitions.
Surely you know more about it than I do, I only fiddled with it for
a little while. And I certainly hope someone will do it, so we can
find out for sure.
The only problem that you can't solve is that there is no image.
But i believe this is not really important. It's much more about
interactivity (inspector) and the good code browsing of a Smalltalk
System.
Well, that and senders and implementers and coding in the debugger
and then restarting the stack and quite an array of things. Even the
multi-window layout contributes to what makes Smalltalk what it is.
A flat IDE isn't the same.
I did a little bit lisp programming in the past and the
image was nothing that i would add to the killer features.
Sadly too many people are black-and-white minded. They want this
and exactly this behaviour and having trying to do it exactly
like Smalltalk is impossible.
I don't know if it's impossible, but I'm convinced it's hard. And as
someone who has used all these languages, including Smalltalk and
Ruby, Ruby has a ways to go in the IDE area before it gets close to
Smalltalk, in my opinion.
Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
Think! -- Aretha Franklin
On Thursday, July 6, 2006, at 6:42:52 PM, Lothar Scholz wrote: