From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2003-08-06T22:45:42+09:00
Subject: Re: newbie question from a smalltalker

On Wednesday, August 6, 2003, 11:22:21 PM, Lyle wrote:
> [...]
> Refactoring tools, as well as tools to extract lists of method 
> implementors/senders, must rely on some kind of "database" of all of the 
> known classes. From what little I know about Smalltalk, this is a 
> central concept in the Smalltalk development environment. There is no 
> such concept in Ruby (or any other programming language that I've worked 
> with).

I'd like to read about how the Smalltalk environment fits together
like this.  All I know is the joke about it having an image problem.

IntelliJ and Eclipse both do a brilliant job at code refactoring and
navigation for Java - probably as good as any Smalltalk environment.
However, if an add-on can do this for Java (whose static typing makes
it possible), yet it can also somehow be done for non-statically-typed
Smalltalk, then there's hope for Ruby.  I suspect the Ruby-in-Ruby
interpreter is the key.

Gavin