Towards a better IDE in Squeak

Daniel Vainsencher danielv at tx.technion.ac.il
Sun Feb 18 21:08:42 UTC 2007


Hi David,

I think you might find some work by Andrew Black and myself interesting. 
It mines some existing patterns from Smalltalk and modern extensible 
IDEs such as Eclipse (and proposes some new ones) for representing code 
models. The main goal is to make code analyses reusable objects so that 
they can be leveraged by different tools (or views), without sacrificing 
performance.

We don't have a current version up on the web at the moment, mail me 
offline if you're interested.

Daniel Vainsencher

David Röthlisberger wrote:
> 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
>
>




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