11–20 of 112 posts
SmallTalk is an uncommon language these days, with the exception of its half-descendant, Objective-C.
Ruby borrows Smalltalk's OO semantics pretty much completely. Just sayin'
Chris Granger's Light Table is also trying to do it. Of course, Bret Victor's talk breathed new life into this whole thing. But everything old is new again. People want to build software from a small kernel that scaffolds itself. They want to immediately switch between "testing the app" mode and "building the app" mode. They want something more than a text file, a tool pipeline, and an executable at the other end. On…
Another approach to this type of thing worth checking out is Dan Ingall's Lively Kernel http://lively-kernel.org/
We are currently experimenting in distributing LK runtimes in nodejs instances so that basically a network of active runtimes can be created that communicate / exchange objects.
Note that the core development moved to github [2].
[1] http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/media/...
This kind of hot-swapping can be achieved on quite a few languages; certainly Perl and Ruby in addition to JS, and I'm sure there's a dozen more languages that allow you to redefine at runtime. The difference is that Smalltalk made hot-editing the default. SmallTalk is an uncommon language these days, with the exception of its half-descendant, Objective-C. Ruby borrows Smalltalk's OO semantics pretty much completely.…
Check out Seaside, the Smalltalk web framework. It has a edit-in-the-browser mode, where you can pretty much edit anything to make your web app work. Seaside itself is a component-centric framework, not page-centric as most web frameworks are. You build independent components, which you place here and there to make your app.
This kind of hot-swapping can be achieved on quite a few languages; certainly Perl and Ruby in addition to JS, and I'm sure there's a dozen more languages that allow you to redefine at runtime. The difference is that Smalltalk made hot-editing the default. SmallTalk is an uncommon language these days, with the exception of its half-descendant, Objective-C. Ruby borrows Smalltalk's OO semantics pretty much completely.…
Indeed. There are all the Lisp dialects to start with.
And it's no surprise that hence SmallTalk had this feature too: Alan Kay (+), one of the key creator of SmallTalk, acknowledged the heavy influence of Lisp on SmallTalk:
http://www.franz.com/services/conferences_seminars/lisp_50th...
(+) Famous quote attributed to Alan Kay: "I coined the term "object oriented". I can tell you I didn't have C++ in mind."
I cringed.