Coding by sending messages

hello,

It's interesting that in Smalltalk, coding is still done via a text editor, not by sending messages to objects (except in the background, parsing & compiling etc). I've been playing with coding by messaging nodes in the AST with a view to coding this way via Roassal graph visualizations of object dependencies combined with some nice graphical tools. Has any work on this way of coding been done before ? What I have in mind is a keyboard-centric, fast system designed as an alternative to the text editor, with a focus on top-down style coding.

The VisualAge series from IBM (Instantiations now owns the Smalltalk variant) used a very visual programming metaphor for Smalltalk, C++ and Java. C++ and Java programmers tended to not like the fact that ENVY was used for code, rather than the file system, and that kind of "if you don't act like it's 1978, you're not a real coder) is a big part of the problem in popularizing decent tools. The Java variant was replaced by Eclipse, which initially had about a quarter of the features and used 10x the memory. The C++ variant is I believe only still available on AIX. All of the versions were themselves written in Smalltalk.

 

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Andrew Glynn

512-818-3291

On Wednesday, June 11, 2014 12:48:05 PM Clément Bera wrote:

Hello,

The problem is that in most cases non text editor based IDE are not user-friendly/hard to understand/hard to use. We are moving toward AST based tools software side but it will still be a textEditor for the user interface.

I remember there may be something similar to what you are looking for here (Gaucho IDE): http://www.inf.usi.ch/phd/olivero/gaucho/home.html

In addition there is the Smart Browser that will be introduced at ESUG (http://vimeo.com/96091089) tht may be related to what you want. People are working on it currently.

But perhaps these 2 projects are quite different.

2014-06-11 11:31 GMT+02:00 Matthew Chadwick <[hidden email]>:

hello,

It's interesting that in Smalltalk, coding is still done via a text editor, not by sending messages to objects (except in the background, parsing & compiling etc). I've been playing with coding by messaging nodes in the AST with a view to coding this way via Roassal graph visualizations of object dependencies combined with some nice graphical tools. Has any work on this way of coding been done before ? What I have in mind is a keyboard-centric, fast system designed as an alternative to the text editor, with a focus on top-down style coding.

+1
Matthew let us know what you get and how we can help you.

The direction to not use text but objects for code is very interesting… a lot of nice experiments could be done on top of this. 

One direction is to use more structured ways of editing… but one needs to take care that in the past (end of the 80ties) all the tries of structured editors

where not really successful. But having an AST like representation instead of text would not preclude to have an editor interface that provided both the

flexibility of a text editor with the knowledge and power of a real object representation of code below… very interesting direction.

Marcus