development

IDE or no

November 27, 2004 14:37:09.849

Lambda the Ultimate links to another IDE post. This is another one of those areas where non-Smalltalkers and Smalltalkers tend to talk right past each other. If you are using Java, you can code in Eclipse, or IntelliJ - or Notepad. If you use Smalltalk, it's simply not like that. With Smalltalk, the IDE is the language for all intents and purposes. What you are doing as a Smalltalker is akin to the old saw about sculpting a statue - you remove everything that doesn't look like a statue, and then you're done. The dilemma pointed out in the linked article doesn't really exist for the Smalltalk developer (as noted in the comments at the end). Need something added to Smalltalk? Why go ahead - extend the language and/or the base classes.

Comments

[Rajesh Jayaprakash] November 27, 2004 23:41:31.974

Need something added to Smalltalk? Why go ahead - extend the language and/or the base classes.
IMHO, this is Smalltalk's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. This has led to non-standardisation and the presence of many (equally good) implementations. In the absence of standardisation (or a single owner of the language -- like Sun for Java), this precludes all implementations from doing things in a uniform (or 100% portable) way.

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