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Comments (61)

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  atgreen
  I set out to create a better text repl experience for Common Lisp couple of months ago, but was inspired by the pharo interface and built something much larger: https://atgreen.github.io/icl/ I use it all the time.
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  jdougan
  There was a browser that worked on Squeak 3, Whisker, that had some of these attributes. I used it up until it became unsupported. It took a little getting used to as its primary orientation was horizontal, but in the age of widescreen monitors that is an advantage.Wiki description: https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1993Archive of its homepage. Has an image of the browser in use. https://web.archive.org/web/20070228113449/http://www.mindsp...
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  mark_l_watson
  While the article makes good points, I simply find it amazing that a programming user interface (with small changes) has been around for so long: I think kit was in 1983 that Xerox Special Information Systems provided me with a free 1 month Smalltalk license for my Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine. That Smalltalk interface is amazingly similar to Pharo Smalltalk which I still occasionally use.
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  Smalltalker-80
  Imo, the problem with the 4-pane browsers are: 1 - The left-most 'package' pane is a flat list. And there are 10K + classes in e.g. Pharo. There are 900+ (!) packages in Pharo, in the pane, so its not easy to scroll through. This is solved 'manually' by have a hierarchical naming of packages. I think this pane should just have tree view. 2 - When developing an app, you may be working on classes in multiple packages. You want to have 'project' view with a simple way of switching between them, without having 10+ system browser windows open, like shown in the article. Dolphin Smalltalk has implemented this concept. Shameless plug: SmallJS (https://small-js.org) has these too..
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  zarzavat
  I fondly remember the browser in F-script Anywhere was fantastic for debugging your own apps and reverse engineering other people's.Smalltalk is how computing should have been: an open book. I hope that one day we can rediscover that magic, we surely have the computing power available to do so.https://www.chromium.org/developers/f-script-anywhere/
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  xkriva11
  From a conceptual point of view, browsing code is like browsing a fractal. Tools must take this into account.
• shevy-java
  I kind of want those things for ruby. Not as an exclusive thing, but something to add-on onto at all times. Objects everywhere.> Why has the four-pane browser survived so long without being replaced by newer (possibly better) metaphors?Smalltalk died though. The ideas may persist but smalltalk is a dead language really.
• sebastianconcpt
  I'm unable to like anything offering me to observe the library with something different than a hierarchy.Abstractions have to be earned.Abstractions have to be exposed so they can be either questioned or exuding their properly valued and time tested structural ontology.In 2015 I wrote how a cool Smalltalk IDE in a web browser would be:https://blog.sebastiansastre.co/posts/the-smalltalk-ide-i-wi...
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  Perenti
  You can run any smalltalk code from workspace-style frames in the Inspector, Workspace, Explorer, Finder and Debugger. You can edit classes and methods in these windows, as well as spawn Browsers as desired. I'm not sure what the integration points are that are lacking. That's not to say there can't be a better way, but I cannot see the point he is making.
• cratermoon
  The best feature of the Smalltalk browser is that there's no such thing as a 'file' in the organization of the code. I get that we have to have files and directories as operating systems use that concept, but it really doesn't make sense to be constrained organize code that way. In particular, tying visibility and module organization to "what file is in what directory" introduces an abstraction useless for source code.
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  brazzy
  Do Smalltalk IDEs really not have the concept of different "views" of the code? The 4-pane hiearchical view is clearly valuable, but why would it need to be "surpassed" rather than complemented by other views that are available when needed and can be switched to or even shown alongside the traditional view?If that kind of thing doesn't exist (and the article sure sounds like that), then yes, it appears the smalltalk ecosystem really has fallen decades behind the state of the art in the IDE area.
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  ivanvoid
  when i was in uni in 2014 i learned that smalltalk became obsolete, later i went to industry to see that no one use smalltalk(or prolog) and yet on this site ppl bringing up smalltalk every single month, why is that i wonder