IDE Debate

Mark Derricutt sends a dose of reality to Smalltalkers via his excellent post on IDEs. In it, he writes:

Sure, alot of the time Smalltalk gives you this "everything is live" scenario, the problem I have is when Blaine (and others) say "there's no shutdown, compile, restart, and retry" which goes all the window when you start asking them about deploying an application.

I've been using Dolphin Smalltalk from Object Arts off and on for the last year for a small windows project, to get an executable you strip the running image down to the executable you ship to clients. As part of this "stripping" process, all the classes and methods that are unused in your application are (as they process implies) stripped/removed leaving you with a nice small redistributable application.

Deployment in Smalltalk is different from everything else. It's more of building down than building up. It just takes some getting used to. Dolphin makes it nice, you just add a category "Must Not Strip" to anything you don't want the automatic stripper to take away. What does the stripper take away? Any class or method not explicitly referenced. The things that get thrown away are methods that are only accessed via "perform" or other forms of reflection. Most Smalltalks allow you to add rules to stop methods from being stripped. It's a gotcha that stings most beginners. But, generally, less than 5% of your code is accessed only through reflection. It's not to say I haven't been bitten by it before. But, I've also been bitten by leaving out a jar in my lib directory at run-time in one of my java applications. It's something you don't forget and make once.

Later on, he talk about intellisense:

DOH! When your autocompletion gives you the wrong information it makes it more than worthless, I hope I don't get people saying 'oh but its because the IDE doesn't know what object you're wanting to complete...' cause that'll be playing right into the arms of pro-static-typing....

Ouch. You got us there. Since, Smalltalk is dynamically typed, it's hard to know what the type is so it just matches on symbols in the system. But, some intellisenses in Smalltalks are smarter. The ECompletion package in Squeak actually uses clues to find ou the type by taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people use the convention of "[a|an]Class" for their arguments. It only gives you the methods for that class if it can figure it out. But, intellisense in statically typed languages is better because they can know the type. It's more precise.

And then, he makes the final wake-up call:

Smalltalk IDEs may have provided all these wonderfull features for the last 20 years or so, but they also seem to have sat stagnant with the thought that they don't need to improve.

This hurts. I believe that Smalltalk IDEs have a lot of room for improvement. Several folks have made efforts to improvement(Whisker, Omnibrowser in Squeak, TrailBlazer in VisualAge for example). There's even efforts to improve the language (Traits). I wouldn't call Smalltalk stagnant and it hurts to see someone have that opinion. I still think with all of the improvements, we could go further. There's several things that I love about Eclipse (like hover over a method and its comment pops up).

I think for many years, Smalltalk was becoming stagnant, but recently, this has been changing. Squeak is undergoing a huge change. VisualWorks doesn't even look like the product from 5 years ago. And Dolphin makes huge leaps and bounds with each release. We need to keep our heads up and see what's going on and incorporate good ideas in Smalltalk and never be satisfied with the current state.

I would like to thank Mark for helping me stay honest....=) I know I tend to talk highly of Smalltalk, but it's because I love it so much. I never want to over-sale it. I'm just trying to be like the "soldiers in the village" and get people excited about what I think is one of the best languages around.