Thursday, December 08, 2005

Live vs. Dead

Torsten speaks about IDEs and he's right on the money. I generally look at Smalltalk's IDE as playing with a live patient. You are in the middle of a living and breathing system that reacts immediately to you. There's no shutdown, compile, restart, and retry. It's all happening right here and now. It's an incredibly cool experience especially when you realize that you can execute any code and inspect the state of the system. Eclipse on the other hand is like looking at your objects through a window. You can do some manipulation, but you can't mess around with the guts of the patient like you can in Smalltalk. The thing that truly shocks me is why Ruby and Python developers still try to mimic Eclipse (ie. run the code in a different process) in the IDEs available. There's no IDE for them that allows you to be in the middle of a live system. Why wouldn't you want that? I can't wait till Ruby does have a great IDE like Smalltalks. It turns the amp to 12 instead of a mere 11.

2 comments:

Vincent Foley said...

Eclipse is like working on Frankeinstein: you plug things, screw bolts and when you think everything is fine and dandy, you turn it on and hope it doesn't kill you.

Smalltalk is like interacting with another human being: you teach things and you can correct immediatly what's wrong.

Isaac Gouy said...

Smalltalk's IDE ... Eclipse on the other hand ...
Eclipse is a Smalltalk IDE!

James Robertson wrote:
"They have customized Eclipse for Resilient... Programming support for debugging, profiling, introspection in the plugin... They built the Eclipse support using the Eclipse plugin support."