This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Re: Smalltalk Eclipse IDE Presentation Post Mortem Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Ryan Lowe comments on Smalltalk for Eclipse (he attended the Ottawa demo last night). I'm always interested in seeing how ST demos come across to people who don't know Smalltalk - for instance this:

Part of the talk included a very interesting tangent on a concept called "doits" (pronounced "do its", not "doyts"). I'm not sure if it only applied to the Smalltalk Eclipse IDE or Eclipse in general though. The idea is to put a simple scripting language in Eclipse that you can use to perform quick tasks in the IDE. The example doit he gave was if someone else found a bug they could attach a doit to the bug report download the project from CVS, compile it and then highlight the line that refers to the bug. A scriptable IDE sounds really cool indeed. I don't think he mentioned a possible language it would use if they made it though. Maybe python?

This points to one of the classic failings of Smalltalk marketing - we don't explain our advantages at all well. The fact that Smalltalk is scriptable (even an end user app - see this post, for instance). It always has been - you can modify the way the environment works in ways that go well beyond the plugin capabilities of Eclipse, but we have not made that clear.

I think my attitude towards Eclipse for Smalltalk has changed though. I was somewhat leery, but I've changed my mind. We need to have things that operate as outreach to the file based, CVS style developers (they are the majority!). If we can't bring Mohammed to the mountain....