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The article mentions the lingering fear of Smalltalk images but virtual machine images offering hope for the future. I experienced this with Smalltalk (Gemstone
by smackay 16y ago
The article mentions the lingering fear of Smalltalk images but virtual machine images offering hope for the future. I experienced this with Smalltalk (Gemstone) apps quite some time ago and that feeling remained with Java on the desktop. What would it take to get non-native environments to integrate better and so gain better acceptance with end-users? Is the browser a better vector since end-users are more accepting of different web site styles rather than desktop app look and feels?
- dfox 16y agoHe is not talking about non-native look and feel, but about image-based development. That is: you directly modify running state of VM and then save all of this state into giant file. Source code is often contained only in this giant binary file, or produced by some specialized tool later. This breaks many common development workflows, for example it is hard to integrate with common (file-based) version control systems.
- duncanj 16y agoThat's true. The problem is that source code is only a fraction of the knowledge contained in the system. In most source-code-based systems, you would write code for building a lookup table, or for reading one from storage. This code would be executed at application startup. In Smalltalk or image-based lisp, you simply make the table and save the image. Unfortunately, the source code now doesn't fully describe the system. Systems like ENVY are intended to provide a process for putting the data in the source.