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These points about modifying things at run time are important, and not all Smalltalk programmers do this nor even understand it, simply using it as another lang

These points about modifying things at run time are important, and not all Smalltalk programmers do this nor even understand it, simply using it as another language and writing something like C in it. Another thing you can do that isn't explicitly mentioned above is "dropToFrame" where you can point to any one of the calling methods out of the call stack and have the process revert to a state so it is like it only just entered that method. I occasionally have debugged bugs that only surfaced rarely simply by having a tester call me when the problem manifests, and I spent a few hours with that function call live, repeatedly taking runs through to see what happened then reverting to a state where the problem was about to manifest but not so early that everything was lost. You can also write debugging code of arbitrary complexity. You could write a 20-line query to do consistency checking of some data structure that is being operated on to satisfy yourself of various things you assume are true. You can make a special debugging subclass of some ubiquitous class, tell one particular instance of the class to become of the subclasses type which will then do all sorts of extra bookkeeping (perhaps recording stack frames every time it is invoked to see who asks it to do things). You can execute a windowUnderMouse call to get an inspector on whatever widget is under your mouse pointer to make sure that the button you are looking at is in fact the one you think you are looking at. I used this to find a problem once where someone had subclassed some complicated window to add some functionality, and one of the buttons didn't work any more: turned out they were creating the same button again in the subclass constructor, which was overlaying the original's button (the one with all the event handlers). I think some of this stuff might be more common in other languages now, but it wasn't in the mid-nineties. I know Java had a limited version of drop-to-frame a number of years ago, but it had some pretty cramping restrictions.

coldtea 9y ago
>These points about modifying things at run time are important, and not all Smalltalk programmers do this nor even understand it, simply using it as another language and writing something like C in it. I don't think that's the case. For one, the design and semantics of the language and overall environment force you to understand this and leverage those kind of features. Second, Smalltalk being a niche language, it attracts programmers for its particularities and overall merits, and those are more likely to know and leverage those things than not. It's not like random corporate programmers are told to use Smalltalk and they use it like a C or Java. It's programmers who have sought after Smalltalk against the current trends that are using it today, and those know very well what it is.
- EdwardCoffin 9y ago
  I'm actually speaking from experience here. I used Smalltalk during the resurgence of the mid-nineties, and I programmed professionally in it at two different companies. The first was where I learned the language, and it was staffed by the type of programmer that did not really understand the interactivity of the system. They really did write a lot of stuff that looked like C, translated into Smalltalk syntax. Not completely, there were some objects, but they did not really get it. I had to learn the interactivity stuff from people at the other company, which was staffed by people who'd been Smalltalk programmers for quite a while, and also people who had experience with other dynamic languages, particularly Common Lisp. That was where I really learned how to do the interactive stuff I mentioned above. You might consider Smalltalk niche now, but in the short period of time before Java came around, it looked like Smalltalk was the future of enterprise computing. That is the period I am specifically talking about.
robertkrahn01 9y ago
Yes, the reified execution stuff is so powerful and fun. You can take a "process", turn it into an object, inspect it, copy it, save it, resume it later, ship it to other VMs and run it there and so on and forth.

coldtea 9y ago

>These points about modifying things at run time are important, and not all Smalltalk programmers do this nor even understand it, simply using it as another language and writing something like C in it. I don't think that's the case. For one, the design and semantics of the language and overall environment force you to understand this and leverage those kind of features. Second, Smalltalk being a niche language, it attracts programmers for its particularities and overall merits, and those are more likely to know and leverage those things than not. It's not like random corporate programmers are told to use Smalltalk and they use it like a C or Java. It's programmers who have sought after Smalltalk against the current trends that are using it today, and those know very well what it is.

EdwardCoffin 9y ago
I'm actually speaking from experience here. I used Smalltalk during the resurgence of the mid-nineties, and I programmed professionally in it at two different companies. The first was where I learned the language, and it was staffed by the type of programmer that did not really understand the interactivity of the system. They really did write a lot of stuff that looked like C, translated into Smalltalk syntax. Not completely, there were some objects, but they did not really get it. I had to learn the interactivity stuff from people at the other company, which was staffed by people who'd been Smalltalk programmers for quite a while, and also people who had experience with other dynamic languages, particularly Common Lisp. That was where I really learned how to do the interactive stuff I mentioned above. You might consider Smalltalk niche now, but in the short period of time before Java came around, it looked like Smalltalk was the future of enterprise computing. That is the period I am specifically talking about.

robertkrahn01 9y ago

Yes, the reified execution stuff is so powerful and fun. You can take a "process", turn it into an object, inspect it, copy it, save it, resume it later, ship it to other VMs and run it there and so on and forth.