Thank you.

On 8/24/06, Colin Putney <cputney at wiresong.ca> wrote:
> I'm making a big deal out of this, because I think it's a really,
> really important feature of modern scripting languages.

Yes and that's why I'm not so fond of the changeset/pepsi syntax
especially because smalltalk tends to have more small classes and
methods that other languages.

> There is, of course, one exception. Smalltalk.
>
> With Smalltalk, we have the best of both worlds. A highly dynamic
> language where metaprogramming is incredibily easy, and at the same
> time, a very powerful IDE. We can do this because we sidestep the
> whole issue of declarative vs. imperative syntax by not having any
> syntax at all.

Well, ignoring some aethetic details, I consider that a changeset is
readable syntax.

Rather what happens is that the IDE forgets all the metaprogramming
actions that, in a scripting language, would structure the code. At
best you get an history with the changes file (which would map to a
trace of the metaprogramming part in a script).

And anyway, the kind of scripts that I'd like to write in smalltalk
rarely (ab)use metaprograming like bigger programs inevitably do.
Example: watch *.tex and call make when one changes. It's more than 15
lines in ruby because I tried to be clever, added a few options and
threw in some ANSI color bling-bling :) I don't think I even declare a
class, it's just a loop.

> I'd much rather see a Smalltalk that let me create small, headless
> images, tens or hundreds of kilobytes in size, with just the little
> bits of functionality I need for a particular task. If they had good
> libraries for file I/O, processing text on stdin/stdout and executing
> other commandline programs, they'd fill the "scripting language"
> niche very well. If they could be created and edited by a larger IDE
> image, they'd have the Smalltalk tools advantage as well.

Granted.

> I have high hopes for Spoon in this regard.

Me too. Pressure, pressure :)

-- 
 Damien Pollet
 type less, do more