RE: [FR-devel] what about a SmallTalkish/emacsish FreeRIDE ?

[Curt Hibbs]

gabriele renzi wrote:
>
> I've been playing with a pair of smaltallk enviroment
> in these days: VisualWorks and Squeak.
> I started it cause people always says smalltalk is
> Ruby's (grand)father.
>
> Now that even I played with ST I can agree that, yes
> ruby is a bad ripoff of smalltalk, as matz admits :).

First of all, I meant to answer you days ago, but I got busy and forgot
about it -- see my comments further down...

> How does this relates to FR?
> Well, it does someway.
>
> The first concept of IDE came out from SmallTalk ,
> people told me.
> And indeed, it seem that every ST distro (excpet from
> Gnu-smalltalk) comes with an impressive bunch of
> graphical tools.
>
> But the thing that really impressed me is that the IDE
> and the CODE are actually one thing.
> You can have your code modify the enviroment at run
> time, and you can explore the inner of the ide from
> the ide itself through yur code.
>
> This is quite impressive, and it ringed a bell in my
> head. Now, I remember that this was the first thing I
> thought about when I heard about a ruby ide written in
> ruby.
>
> So I wonder: would it be possible, and would you be
> interested, in having FR behave
> someway like this ?

I was a smalltalk programmer in the late 1980's, and  agree that there is
much to like about smalltalk. I used to like the monolithic runtime model
until it started to get in my way.

The problem is that it does not lend itself easily for use in projects that
have more than one developer. And since it does not use standard text files,
it does not integrate very well with the rest of the computing universe.
This also makes version control (CVS) a problem.

What I like about Ruby is that it retains most of the advantages of
smalltalk without these limitations.

On the other hand, I think there could be a place for a "super irb" facility
like you describe. I wouldn't personally be interested in it, but others
might. If you decide to develop such a beast, doing it as a FreeRIDE plugin
(or set of plugins) would let you take advantage of all the other FreeRIDE
capabilities.

Curt

> ----
> Well, I'm going to my university courses, so I have
> little time to write. But I'd love to know what you
> think of this soon.
> (having a "it's impossible, stupid" before I start to
> dream is better than nothing)
>
>
> some sparse thoughts that I can't explain (both for
> notime and for no clear idea):
>
> smalltalk is image based
> But when FR is up it is someway a running image
>
> debug of FR from running FR
>
> change every system(ruby) and `ruby ` to some kind of
> eval
> (need to have some of them still there, I think, as an
> option)
>
> start block for evals in a new thread with $SAFE>0 ?
>
> taint all newly created object (thos in the block) to
> avoid killing FR
>
> faster run/correct/run/correct cycle, No need to start
> a new interpreter
>
> allows to change STDIN,STDOUT, $deferr and so on, so
> they could act in the graphical enviroment
>
> gets() and the like could pop up some input box,
> fixing the need to use the cli to input and to the
> outputpane to get the result. Choice to embed IRB more
> easily?
>
> no need for '2>&1'. Choice to have different outputs
> for stdout and stderr even on platform not directly
> supporting it .
>
> some kind of 'do: ' textbox to change FR at runtime
>
> Faster plugin development
>
> chance to set ARGV dynamically from 'do:'-box, no need
> for special subsystem
>
> you could actually use ruby to code
> (i.e. in the 'do:'-box put "EditPane.text.gsub
> /old_met_name/ , 'new_met' ")
>
> better, highlight and right-click to 'local do:'-box
> to have commands
> executed on a block of code
>
> refactoring methods from do-box ?
> (highlight->rightclick->box->write 'extract_meth' in
> the box-> execute)
>
> emacs!
>
> fr someway like irb**3 ?
>
> choice to hijack File-related classes so that we can
> add a
> 'remove file script.output.txt before you restart
> script.rb?'
>
> would it be possible to hijack ruby so that we could
> register constants/module/class/method definitions?
> someway like debug.rb? No more need for a home built
> parser?
>
> freeride as a framework (do-box ->Dialog.new 'Hello
> from FR world!' )
>
> freeride as an interactive learning experience :)
>
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