You might try looking at http://amber-lang.net/ as a test for your ideas. It's a Smalltalk implementation running in JavaScript.
The Web Is Becoming Smalltalk
21–30 of 112 posts
Re: The Web Is Becoming Smalltalk
#22Chris 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…
The Bret Victor presentation for those interested: http://vimeo.com/36579366
I can't help but smile while I watch.
Re: The Web Is Becoming Smalltalk
#23I can't believe that the fact that Chrome can hot-swap code is surprising to anyone... Have you never been working on an app, opened up the console, changed a variable or function definition and seen the effect in real time?
Re: The Web Is Becoming Smalltalk
#24Chris 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…
Its not the same. Light Table and Bret's demos go way beyond what Smalltalk ever did. Its not just about hot swapping, but liveness, and the Smalltalk community never got that [1]. But it doesn't stop them from saying they've already done it because they don't understand what they are seeing, and thinking is hard.
[1] John Maloney got it with Morphic, and even coins the term Liveness at about the same time Tanimoto does. However, this was originally in Self and relatively independent from Self's hot swapping capabilities. It also didn't really map back to code very well (it was very dependent on direct manipulation via Morphic's edit menu).
Re: The Web Is Becoming Smalltalk
#25WebDAV? Heaven help us…
Why the dislike? It's not a bad protocol.
From what I remember, it's pretty chatty. It appears to be on its way out. Is there any new software that's using it?
WebDAV had some varying levels of support in Windows and Mac desktops. But AFAIK the Windows stuff got broken; not sure about Mac. I think that access from a GUI file browser was one of its main use cases in the 90's. If nobody does that anymore, and I don't think they do, then the protocol will need a new app or it will continue to die.
Re: The Web Is Becoming Smalltalk
#26This 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.…
You can even do it in Java with Eclipse (Notch did it during his screencast), although I don't know the specifics.
Notch used a special programming framework to get their. Many game engines support similar features; the ability to modify the game world while its running, and can even do that with C++. The problem is you don't get it for free (framework transparent hot swapping isn't good enough), and its only because of special compromises made in the framework that you can get liveness at all.
Re: The Web Is Becoming Smalltalk
#27This 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.…
You can even do it in Java with Eclipse (Notch did it during his screencast), although I don't know the specifics.
Intellij keeps telling me it has the feature. Although I've never managed to use it on purpose.
Re: The Web Is Becoming Smalltalk
#28I read the title and had some first thoughts spring to mind, and didn't reach the same conclusion as the author. While cool it was, it was limited in reach, and I think you could go further with this analogy.
Treat every web site or address or endpoint as an object. Allow message passing as though the web were simply a single object-oriented system resident on the same computer. The definitions of the APIs are kept as standard, so the system "just works" with any site.
This is, of course, the vision of APIs. But could we do better? Could we make it closer to a true object-oriented system, even simpler to use? Not sure if it would make a big difference, but as we know, sometimes a simple thing that makes connections easier can make a huge difference (eg: XmlHttpRequest).
Make the web as easy as smalltalk. For every API, and eventually, every site. Not just the ones we decide to make language-specific libraries for. One library per language just interfaces with "the web" as a fully-generic API you can access as easily as any object.
Just thought I'd share this thought. Any thoughts or ideas?
Re: The Web Is Becoming Smalltalk
#29I felt this way when I first saw better_errors: https://github.com/charliesome/better_errors
It's a little surprising how much we keep reinventing.
Re: The Web Is Becoming Smalltalk
#30I hate to be picky, but it's Smalltalk, not SmallTalk.