Towards a better IDE in Squeak

Robert Hawley rhawley at plymouth.ac.uk
Wed Feb 21 00:34:54 UTC 2007


I suggest the areas of documentation and expanation should be more developed within the environment.

In these days of wikis I would suggest that everything in the system could be linked to an 'open documentation system'.  As well as methods and classes, other things like packages, frameworks, patterns, traits, interfaces etc., could be given a structure around which they could be documented.  Examples of how to run things, along with suitable monitoring tools to act as (more visual) inspectors could be provided to demonstrate subsystems.  At the level of auto documentation, it should be possible to make use of example objects to generate expanations based on the existing linkages.  It may be possible to use reasoning systems to deduce information about things like type behaviours.  The IDE is not just for expert programmers - it needs to be available to beginners and learners and so should also address their needs - automated and written expanantions could help this.




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