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According to you, what was lost? I've never fully experienced Smalltalk, but the few posts that came by on HN always fascinated me, since there's a whole inter
by mettamage 5y ago
According to you, what was lost?
I've never fully experienced Smalltalk, but the few posts that came by on HN always fascinated me, since there's a whole interactivity element to it. And I've noticed when it comes to programming, I like interactivity.
- poulsbohemian 5y agoFYI: Responded to your email privately.
- capableweb 5y agoThe Pharo "Features" page features animated GIFs and some text explaining the awesomeness of Smalltalk: https://pharo.org/features https://pharo.org/features
- smackeyacky 5y agoThe only two things I miss and they are closely related: 1. being able to catch an exception, and injecting a sensible return value so the underlying code could continue. Its incredibly powerful although a lot of inexperienced smalltalkers used it as a crutch for poor design. I.e. I won't handle the error or do bounds checking, I will put a try/catch block around it and send back some value the code can handle. 2. The interactive debugger was truly fix and continue, not the pale imitation you get in .NET or Java. Your code crashed, it threw up an exception window, you fixed the method and restarted the thread of execution like nothing happened. You can kinda do this in .NET now but its slow and doesn't always work right. The rest of the environment goodies like variable inspectors and live expression evaluation are largely as good or better in java and C# than the classic commercial smalltalks.
- pjmlp 5y agoStill not the same, but the recently hot reload on VS 2022, or JRebel get closer to the experience. And this is the best we currently have, other languages are even more behind than those two ones.
- brabel 5y ago> And this is the best we currently have, Haha, no... have you heard of Lisp?
- pjmlp 5y agoHaha, are you new around here? I have certainly heard about Lisp, in fact, many haven't heard about Allegro Common Lisp or Lisp Works, the only ones that matter, which the FOSS usually ignores. This doesn't change the fact that sadly Lisp and Smalltalk are almost nowhere to be seen in 2021 (in large deployments).