From: wsdng@... (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Sascha_D=F6rdelmann?=)
Date: 2003-08-07T18:05:10+09:00
Subject: Re: newbie question from a smalltalker

Mark Wilson <mwilson13@cox.net> wrote:
> I hope that you can put together a list of the tools you would like to 
> see in Ruby from your perspective based on experience with Smalltalk.

The main strenght of Smalltalk IDEs are the debugging features.

In a Smalltalk IDE every unhandled exception opens the debugger. The
debugger works on a copy of the actual stack including every context
information you might need. You have to have a very close look at the
code to recognise that the stack is only a copy. In fact you are able
to change every single aspect of the stack and restart execution of
the stack at every position you want.

This changes the way of programming completely because it supports one
of the key postulations of eXtreme programming: Test first. You write
the test, let it fail and do the complete programming in the debugger.
The end of the process is a running testcase.

It's very hard to explain. You'll need to look over the shoulder of an
an experienced Smalltalker to get a glimpse of what is possible!

The obvious way to have similar features in a ruby IDE would be the
Ruby in Ruby approach. But you don't need to go that far. The key
feature for such an "image based" IDE is some kind of Binary Object
Storage. Store the state of IRB and you got a handy bootstrap for
creating everything you need.

I like Ruby very much and I would be very happy to see anything
similar in Ruby but to be honest: If I need a powerful debugging IDE
I'm better off with Smalltalk.

Cheers
Sascha