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Smalltalk’s use of live coding is easy and elegant; not even Common Lisp, Forth, nor Java (hot swapping) can lay claim to that. Does anyone understand what thi

Smalltalk’s use of live coding is easy and elegant; not even Common Lisp, Forth, nor Java (hot swapping) can lay claim to that. Does anyone understand what this is talking about? I may not understand exactly what is meant by "live coding", but I think I do it in Common Lisp (via SLIME) all the time. How is it better in Smalltalk?

coliveira 9y ago
This is certainly an exaggeration, but I think they are referring to the integration between the language and UI elements, which can be easily changed live. The difference is that the Smalltalk UI was designed so that you can swap the code behind it during a development session and save the result in an image file, while other toolkits use a more traditional build-and-display approach.
i_feel_great 9y ago
In Smalltalk, you can pause your application and inspect the objects alive in a stack at the time you paused it, go backwards and forwards in the stack, change them to see an alternative future, make changes and resume. It is the weirdest shit.
- ScottBurson 9y ago
  Common Lisp implementations admittedly vary in how well they support interacting with the stack in this way, but some of them do it just fine, as did the Lisp Machines. (The Lisp Machine developers were heavily influenced by Smalltalk, so I'm not saying Smalltalk doesn't deserve credit for the innovation; I'm just wondering what I'm missing, if anything, by using CL today.)
- igouy 9y ago
  And because it's been around for decades, people figure out how create something like that functionality for other languages: JavaScript Time-Travel Debugger https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/javascript-time-travel-debugger/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/javascript-... https://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/Marron/Time-Travel-Debugging-for-JavaScriptHTML https://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/Marron/Time-Travel-Debugging...

coliveira 9y ago

This is certainly an exaggeration, but I think they are referring to the integration between the language and UI elements, which can be easily changed live. The difference is that the Smalltalk UI was designed so that you can swap the code behind it during a development session and save the result in an image file, while other toolkits use a more traditional build-and-display approach.

i_feel_great 9y ago

In Smalltalk, you can pause your application and inspect the objects alive in a stack at the time you paused it, go backwards and forwards in the stack, change them to see an alternative future, make changes and resume. It is the weirdest shit.

ScottBurson 9y ago
Common Lisp implementations admittedly vary in how well they support interacting with the stack in this way, but some of them do it just fine, as did the Lisp Machines. (The Lisp Machine developers were heavily influenced by Smalltalk, so I'm not saying Smalltalk doesn't deserve credit for the innovation; I'm just wondering what I'm missing, if anything, by using CL today.)
igouy 9y ago
And because it's been around for decades, people figure out how create something like that functionality for other languages: JavaScript Time-Travel Debugger https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/javascript-time-travel-debugger/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/javascript-... https://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/Marron/Time-Travel-Debugging-for-JavaScriptHTML https://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/Marron/Time-Travel-Debugging...