3 ms·

It's pretty rare that you'd actually make ad-hoc changes and then rely solely upon persistence to preserve those changes. Ultimately, you'd want to write code t

It's pretty rare that you'd actually make ad-hoc changes and then rely solely upon persistence to preserve those changes. Ultimately, you'd want to write code to produce the outcome programatically. It's more the case that you play around and do little "what ifs", which helps you crystalize your ideas about what you're trying to implement. The trouble is that just explaining the mechanics of it doesn't really capture the experience, and if you talk about the experience on its own, you end up talking about, er, fishes. Which is to say that it's an almost useless analogy, but one that I don't know how to better. Still, using Python to pay the bills isn't so bad...

yeahbutbut 13y ago
> Still, using Python to pay the bills isn't so bad... Well, and pdb isn't bad.
- aaronem 13y ago
  It exists. That's better than the alternative, and if this seems like damning with faint praise, it's because there really isn't anything else good to say on the subject -- the debugging facilities available in any Lisp environment, even Emacs, make those offered by Python (or Perl, or Ruby, or Javascript) look pitiful, and from all I've seen of Smalltalk, it is to Lisp as Lisp is to your interpreted language of choice.
aaronem 13y ago
There's barely any such thing as a debugger, and no such thing as an object graph, and even modifying a function in place is far more complicated than real tools would make it -- but nonetheless, in the sort of browser-based Javascript development I do on an almost daily basis, I sense a faint echo of the je ne sais quoi to which you refer; specifically, iteratively fiddling with a live system until it behaves more like how you want, then baking those changes into the serialized form of it (also called "source code") so that they're incorporated next time the system is instantiated. Granted, I have only the most trivial experience with Smalltalk; I'm pretty sure at least some of the concepts I have in mind here are entirely meaningless in that context, but I wonder if it would be fair nonetheless to consider the modern browser Javascript environment, for example Firefox with Firebug and a proper REPL instead of the single-line console, as potentially possessing at least some of the flexibility a Smalltalker considers de rigeur. On the other hand, if you wanted to build, for example, an object-graph generator in pure Javascript, I don't think you could do so, at least not one worth having; unless I'm very much mistaken, Javascript's reflection facilities don't suffice to allow one thing to notice when another thing changes, unless the latter thing explicitly notifies the former of the change. So you'd have what would be essentially static analysis on running code; you could recursively walk properties from the global object on down, following references where necessary, but it'd be dog-slow in modern JS implementations; worse, there'd be no way to keep it synchronized with the actual state of the objects to which it refers, short of rewalking everything to spot the changes, which would be ugly in theory and unusable in practice. So it's probably also accurate to say that the modern browser Javascript environment offers no immediate prospect of attaining anything remotely resembling the facilities a Smalltalker considers de rigeur. Which is a shame, because what I've seen of Smalltalk has been impressive in the extreme, especially by contrast to the tools whose use I can actually justify in my professional life.

yeahbutbut 13y ago

> Still, using Python to pay the bills isn't so bad... Well, and pdb isn't bad.

aaronem 13y ago
It exists. That's better than the alternative, and if this seems like damning with faint praise, it's because there really isn't anything else good to say on the subject -- the debugging facilities available in any Lisp environment, even Emacs, make those offered by Python (or Perl, or Ruby, or Javascript) look pitiful, and from all I've seen of Smalltalk, it is to Lisp as Lisp is to your interpreted language of choice.

aaronem 13y ago

There's barely any such thing as a debugger, and no such thing as an object graph, and even modifying a function in place is far more complicated than real tools would make it -- but nonetheless, in the sort of browser-based Javascript development I do on an almost daily basis, I sense a faint echo of the je ne sais quoi to which you refer; specifically, iteratively fiddling with a live system until it behaves more like how you want, then baking those changes into the serialized form of it (also called "source code") so that they're incorporated next time the system is instantiated. Granted, I have only the most trivial experience with Smalltalk; I'm pretty sure at least some of the concepts I have in mind here are entirely meaningless in that context, but I wonder if it would be fair nonetheless to consider the modern browser Javascript environment, for example Firefox with Firebug and a proper REPL instead of the single-line console, as potentially possessing at least some of the flexibility a Smalltalker considers de rigeur. On the other hand, if you wanted to build, for example, an object-graph generator in pure Javascript, I don't think you could do so, at least not one worth having; unless I'm very much mistaken, Javascript's reflection facilities don't suffice to allow one thing to notice when another thing changes, unless the latter thing explicitly notifies the former of the change. So you'd have what would be essentially static analysis on running code; you could recursively walk properties from the global object on down, following references where necessary, but it'd be dog-slow in modern JS implementations; worse, there'd be no way to keep it synchronized with the actual state of the objects to which it refers, short of rewalking everything to spot the changes, which would be ugly in theory and unusable in practice. So it's probably also accurate to say that the modern browser Javascript environment offers no immediate prospect of attaining anything remotely resembling the facilities a Smalltalker considers de rigeur. Which is a shame, because what I've seen of Smalltalk has been impressive in the extreme, especially by contrast to the tools whose use I can actually justify in my professional life.