From: Christopher Sawtell <csawtell@...>
Date: 2001-12-04T19:18:17+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:27431] Re: Killer app for Ruby developers?

On Tuesday 04 December 2001 10:23, Hal E. Fulton wrote:
> This is an idea that is very skeletal
> yet I think there's a twist that makes
> it significant (especially for XP people).
>
> The basic idea:
>
> A browser-editor that can do basic
> refactoring (and maybe some source
> control functions). Should of course be
> scriptable in Ruby. Should have some
> kind of template or script support for
> Lapidary or RubyUnit or whatever.
> Disclaimer: I don't know SmallTalk, but
> I hear the browser is a thing of beauty.

Indeed they are - Smalltalk has half a dozen different browsers, each for a 
particular purpose. With 30 odd years of development behind it Smalltalk has
( imho ) got terribly bloated and slow. Certainly this is true of the Squeak 
dialect. It does some absolutely amazing things, but you _have_ to have some 
pretty recent hardware with lots of memory or else you sit around for aeons.
The JIT compiler option makes quite a bit of difference, but I now have a new 
understanding of the meaning of patience.

> The twist:
>
> Net-enable it for the purpose of... <drum
> roll please> remote pair programming!

Squeak smalltalk has a facility known as "Nebraska" which does this.
Turn it on and you get two labeled cursors in the same desk evironment.

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1356

In turn Nebraska is somewhat based on "Kansas":-

http://research.sun.com/research/ics/kansas.html

Pinch the good ideas from those.

> Pair with anyone in the world, given an
> IP address and a time to meet.
>
> I envision a button that switches between
> "You Drive" and "I'll Drive" -- each person
> completely controls the app while he is in
> charge.
>
> Should have at least a chat box, maybe even
> voice, maybe even webcam.

Hey! What about my privacy? I'm no Jenny!  :-)
Personally I couldn't cope with a web-cam.

> One problem: Do we settle on a fixed editor?
> Make it configurable? Give it "faces" that look
> like emacs or whatever? Not everyone agrees
> on the choice of editor. (I think my opinion is to
> have a "neutral ground" editor.)

You don't need an over-featured and thus bloated editor for editing code in 
this kind of highly interactive situation. It would be nice if the basic key 
bindings to the various tasks could be configurable, with stock configs 
selectable in some way. That would keep the vi / emacs war at bay.

> Thoughts, anyone?

Lovely idea. Ruby is so much easier to understand than Smalltalk.
Please make sure that you put in a Breakpoint or Stop statement so that the 
interpreter takes it's datastream from the keyboard instead of from the file. 
This makes it possible to debug a running program from the precise point of 
context. Just like dear old BASIC did all those years ago. Only good feature.

I love the Smalltalk ability to execute the line on which the cursor is 
sitting, or the block of code you have selected.