Hi guys,
I only looked into Animorphic ST for a couple of minutes so far, but by first impression was, this is how Smalltalk should look like. Besides the system system, I like the Self-like browers.
I found the type-system the most unnatural part about StrongTalk. It feels displaced and if you look at methods like "->" in Object you can see that there are some rather nasty complexities associated with it (not to mention readability issues).
Before your message I was so depressed because I felt alone :-P
( Andreas, we are on the same side this time =o) )
To say the true, the only thing I like about StrongTalk is the dynamic compiler. The other unnatural thing is the absence of an image.
In Smalltalk (without types) no tool can exactly know the type of an expression and code completion (with is IMHO the best productivity tool of a modern IDE) cannot offer a valid selection of applicable method names.
That has been said many times and yet, I disagree. To the best of my knowledge nobody has ever tried to build a simple type inference system which just goes along with you as you are writing code and tries to discover what the types might be.
I feel that tools like code completion are comfortable things, but if you have an object and you don't know what messages you have to send, you are in trouble! and no type system can help you.
Anyway in ST you have a really good option -> the debugger! I you feel a little bit lost, just write in the method "self halt" and the execution context of the method will help you.
Cheers,
Diego Gomez Deck