Oh, the excitement

Now the next step - can they inspect an object from the debugger, then within the inspector send messages to the object? Wouldn't it be really cool if there was an environment that could do that?

I was actually blown away by the IDE features such as the amazing refactoring support and the user interface widgets that help the developer every step of the way. Edit and continue is something I have always enjoyed as a VB programmer. Moving to C#\VB.Net we lost that. I was trying to show the vs.net team that if Java could do it, so can they. The thing is, the next version of vb.net will have EAC, but only for vb.net. Still, the IDE will be a lot less powerfully than the Intellij IDEA one. As for smalltalk, I've tried it before, but just could not grok it. Perhaps it's because you never really get to know something unless you actually nave to work with it. But I have all the respect in the world for it.

Comment on RE:Oh, the excitement by James Robertson

I'd be curious to know what was hard for you to grok in Smalltalk, and how long it's been since you looked. If it was recently, I'd appreciate knowing what made things hard.

It was about two-three years ago, as far as I remember. I was just getting into a much more OO state of mind (groking GOF) and SmallTalk was pretty high on my list from all the reading I had done. Again, I'm not sure, but I think I tried Dolphin Smalltalk. It was about 3 days of trying to do *something* with it, but I think my state of mind was not OO enough. It was pertty hard to get the concept of MVC for me, and actually thinking in SmallTalk terms, such that whatever variable you created was there in future uses for it while you're inside the session(did that even make sense?), well, I guess the paradigm shift was just too steep a learning curve for a VB6'er. I'm sure that today I'd be better suited to "grok" it, but I really don't feel the need to. However, I always try to keep an open mind, and I consider SmallTalk as "one of those things" that sit tightly in the back of my mind that I know someday I'll take them out again and see if I can wrap my mind around them again. As for learning curve, it was much easier to "get" C# than it was SmallTalk, but then, I think I found much more material on that language, and it was much more organized.