This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Sometimes, it's frustrating
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.
I see posts like this and I realize how small the impact of Smalltalk and Lisp have been on most developers. Have a look below:
At one time or another, every programmer has imagined what it would be like to work directly with the deep structure of code. Some of the best minds in the business are working to make that happen. The legendary Charles Simonyi, who left Microsoft a couple of years ago to pursue his vision of intentional programming, says deep structure is at the core of the toolset his new company, Intentional Software, is building. Sergey Dmitriev shares Simonyi's vision, and his company -- JetBrains, creator of IntelliJ IDEA -- wants to do something similar with its next-generation toolset. These projects are still under wraps, but another champion of deep structure is working out in the open. Jonathan Edwards, currently a visiting engineer with MIT's Software Design Group, has built a prototype system that he is demonstrating in a screencast at subtextual.org.
There are big ideas at work here. In Edwards' prototype, programming, testing, and debugging are just different ways of interacting with a program's tree structure. Edwards' 2004 OOPSLA paper, Example-centric programming, explores one of the benefits of this arrangement: the examples (or "use cases") that drive program design are worked out the context of the living and evolving program. We've all heard this stuff before. I may yet go to my grave without emacs ever having been pried from my cold dead fingers. But it's worth pondering, now and then, what we could do with tools that didn't think of programs as strings of text. Full story InfoWorld.com
You know, it's not like this stuff doesn't already exist. I realize that it's likely news to Gosling, who seems to think that he's the first one to have ever thought of parse trees. As for Simonyi, I think the phrase "Hungarian Notation" tells me everything I need to know about what his vision would look like... almost certainly a place I'd have no interest in going.
Seriously though, live code isn't a new thing at all - Lisp has been around a long time, and so has Smalltalk. Everything that is talked about above - it's been out there, implemented and in use for (literally) decades now. I guess that - for lots of developers - if it doesn't use curly braces and semi-colons, it simply doesn't exist...
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