Hi all,

I'm currently doing a PhD under the supervision of Stephane Ducasse and 
Oscar Nierstrasz at the university of Bern, Switzerland. My main 
research interests are in the context of Integrated Development 
Environments (IDEs). I'm planning to work on the Squeak IDE to see how 
the IDE of a dynamic object-oriented programming language can be 
improved and extended.
Especially, I want to experiment with different metaphors to browse and 
navigate source code, with new metaphors to present static (i.e., 
classes, methods, source code) as well as dynamic aspects (i.e., 
objects, relationships between objects, etc.) of a program in the same 
IDE, with new ways to modify and edit source code, etc.
I believe that we can do more in a better way these days than what we 
have in the current IDE in Smalltalk or in Java. I believe that the IDE 
of the future can help the programmer to program more efficiently and 
with less errors by giving him more insights into the program being 
developed or by providing him with better tools and guides during his 
daily work. I believe that what we have now as IDEs are far away from 
what is possible to have and even far away from what we actually need to 
be effective and efficient in our daily work. This is a bit sad for 
Smalltalk, because a long time ago it had the best IDE, but now Eclipse 
is getting better and better while the IDE of Smalltalk / Squeak stays 
more or less the same. During my PhD I want to see how we can get 
something better out of the current Squeak IDE.

I write this message out of two reasons: First, I would like to know if 
you have ideas for things that are missing in the current DIE of Squeak, 
"things", tools, metaphors, ideas that you would like to see 
implemented. What are your ideas of how an IDE could help you to work 
more efficiently in your daily work? Where is the current IDE in your 
way, where is it not good enough, what could be better? What do you 
miss, what do you need to get a better IDE?

Second, I would also like to do kind of empirical studies in the future 
to somehow validate the effectiveness and efficiency of new approaches 
for an IDE, hence I need subjects performing some experiments in these 
future IDEs and I also need data about how you use your IDE (e.g., how 
you browse source code, how and where you write source code, with which 
tools, etc.). Will you be willing to provide me with these data recorded 
by some non-invasive recordings tools you can simply load in your image 
and which will then save the recorded data to a file which you would 
then send to me? Are you also willing to perform some experiments in new 
IDEs, e.g. trying and playing with them, use them for a project of 
yours, etc.?
For me it is important to know if I can motivate enough people to do a 
serious empirical study. Without that, I would have a hard time to 
"prove" that a new approach to e.g. navigate source code is indeed 
useful and promising, because this is very much dependent on personal 
feelings and impressions. Only a broader study can hence "prove" the 
general usefulness (or uselessness) of such a new approach or metaphor.

Thanks for your help.

Kind regards,
David