Dreaming of new generation IDE

[Steve Holden]

catonano wrote:
[... much wishing for the "good old day" of SmallTalk ...]
> Today, I tried to understand the twisted.web.client code and I found 3
> methods I couldn't find by who were called.
> 
> I asked on the mailing list and they suggested me where they were
> called and that the tool for such thing is "grep".
> 
> So, you grep, you get a list of files, you open each one of them and
> keep scrolling and switching from one file to another... endlessly.
> Maybe I'm getting old, but I tend to get lost in the process.
> 
Maybe you are getting old. Or maybe you didn't realise that the advice
was given you so that it would be useful whether or not you were using
an IDE.

> I can't believe the code editing situation today is in a such sorry
> state.
> 
It isn't. There are many IDEs that will allow you to easily locate the
calls of specific methods.

> Is this what you meant ?
> 
> If it's this, then it's not experimental at all, it's been done
> already and been put apart.
> 
> Crap won :-(
> 
It seems you yearn for the days of the SmallTalk image. Unfortunately
this didn't allow for conveniences like using external data stored in
files whose contents persisted and which could be transferred between
different machines.

I would never call SmallTalk "crap": it was a ground-breaking system
almost 40 yers ago. But the environment suffered from many limitations
of which you appear to be entirely unaware.

> You write:
> 
>> Instead of current text-oriented IDEs, it
>> should be a database-centric
> 
> well, it seems you agree with Alan Kay, (the Smalltalk inventor) when
> he wrote that programming is NOT glorified text editing.
> 
> He called it "direct manipulation" every method was a live thing you
> could send messages to and the source code that implemented it was
> just an attribute of the method.
> 
This aspect of SmallTalk was one of the things that made software
engineering rather difficult. Everything could be changed on the fly.

> So you could have had a World Of Warcraft like interface, to
> manipulate your methods.
> 
> You know what I'm doing now ? I'm drawing the map of
> twisted.web.client on a paper with a pencil :-(
> 
Well why don't you get yourself a sensible tool like Wing IDE or Komodo?
They at least will let you solve the problem you currently face without
having to poke around in the innards of a running virtual machine the
way we used to in SmallTalk.

regards
 Steve
-- 
Steve Holden           +1 571 484 6266   +1 800 494 3119
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