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I did look at Amber before starting SmallJS. But having a full, separate IDE seemed nicer than a limited one in the browser. Amber itself has been stagnant for
by Smalltalker-80 1y ago
I did look at Amber before starting SmallJS. But having a full, separate IDE seemed nicer than a limited one in the browser. Amber itself has been stagnant for a few years now, alas.
- bradrn 1y agoBut isn’t it sort of the whole point of Smalltalk that the IDE and the code run at the same time in the same place?
- Smalltalker-80 1y agoI would say the main point of Smalltalk that everything is an object, including basic types and also classes (reflection). That make everything so much simpler and more consistent. Having a 'live' IDE is nicely interactive, but it also has downsides, like a big image that stores side effects, bootstrapping issues when changing low-level stuff, and your program can break your IDE (corrupt the image), deploying an app is more complex because the image has to dangerously 'strip' itself of unneeded stuff. So as a 'compromise' SmallJS has a very quick change-compile-run cycle of about a second or two, without the downsides mentioned above.