I'm a long-time lurker on this list, and still more of an
intermediate-squeaker (is that a word?) rather than pharo (although I
have used this off and on since pharo-5), so I feel like a bit of an
imposter jumping into this thread (long-time lisper).
That said, and without wishing to ruffle any feathers nor cause any
rancour (if I do, I apologise), may I humbly disagree with some of the
opinions mentioned by some certainly more accomplished Smalltalkers
than me.
Sven said:
> Everybody is of course totally free to do whatever they want, but really, why
> the hell would you want to do that ?
> You lose so much by doing that, I do not even know where to start.
> A big part of what makes Pharo (or any Smalltalk) special is the IDE written
> in itself.
Esteban said:
> Honestly, Pharo without the environment (and the “live objects” approach) is
> just another dynamic language without much interest.
There's a distinction between "how you enter source code" and "the
full live object environment" paradigm.
No matter how you setup your smalltalk, at some point, you have to
talk to your system. Tell it to subclass Object because I want to add
a new class. Or add a new method to an existing class. Or just execute
this code right now, as is (Workspace/Playground). Etc, etc.
There are numerous text editor widgets sprinkled throughout
squeak/cuis/pharo's set of "tools" which enable you to do exactly that
- talk to the system.
These various editor widgets distinguish themselves slightly by
binding Self to something convenient (in the browser, for example),
but other than that - they're just text widgets.
The magic only happens once you take the text, and tell the system to
**do something with it**. Save, Do-it, print-it, etc.
Up to that point, its just text. Dumb, simple, plain text.
So, in a real sense, does it matter where you enter that dumb, simple,
plain text?
As long as there is an immediate, simple, failsafe way to sending that
text to the system to "do something with me", then you still have the
same live environment. Surely?
At that point, it doesn't matter (from the point of view of having a
"live system") whether the dumb, simple, plain text was initially
entered, from keyboard to screen, via the smalltalk process or another
external process.
One can certainly argue that simple fileouts, editing, and filingin is
too clunky a process. But, for example, having a fuse filesystem
exporting the live contents of the class hierarchy:
- every time you read "/Class-as-Dir/Method-as-file", the current
source is queried from the live smalltalk system
- every time you write to that file the smalltalk system is updated
Surely this would keep much of the same "liveness-in-spirit"? With the
added advantages of:
- spreading a little of the cpu burden around the various cores
(although this isn't really a cpu-intensive task anyway, but this
might apply more if we had out-of-image graphical inspectors which
also communicated via fuse)
- taking advantage of the **vastly** more advanced text editing
widgets available outside of pharo
Certainly, this is what Craig Latta webdav system is trying to get at.
I think its an interesting area to explore, and does not in any way
distract from "liveness" or "smalltalk'iness".
Ok, rant over :)
--
Regards,
Imran Sher Rafique
On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 at 05:54, Sven Van Caekenberghe <s...@stfx.eu> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On 24 Jan 2019, at 12:10, Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.al...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Often we have users of emacs and vim that request a way to use their
> > favorite shortcuts or features. Some even ask "Would not be nice if I could
> > use my favorite code editor with Pharo ?"
> >
> > Actually not only you can do it, its also very easy. So the following video
> > tutorial explains in the first 3 minutes how to do this and then spends
> > another 10 min talking about how this could be automated to be completely
> > automatic and instantaneous.
> >
> > https://youtu.be/3YfRhDafIxs
>
> Everybody is of course totally free to do whatever they want, but really, why
> the hell would you want to do that ?
>
> You lose so much by doing that, I do not even know where to start.
>
> A big part of what makes Pharo (or any Smalltalk) special is the IDE written
> in itself.
>
> Editing a .st file has always been possible, it is masochism.
>
> There is for example https://github.com/dmatveev/shampoo-emacs which already
> makes a bit more sense (but even then).
>
> Really, why do you think all these big IDE environments exist in the first
> place ?
>
> Sven
>
>
