[squeak-dev] Everyone's talking about debuggers these days

Frank Shearar frank.shearar at gmail.com
Sun Apr 7 09:00:44 UTC 2013


On 6 April 2013 23:48, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
>
> On 06-04-2013, at 3:13 PM, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> What I find interesting in Phexample, and Gilad Bracha's "debug mode
>> is the only mode", and Lightable, and Bret Victor's demo, is... it's
>> all old news!
>
>
> Some of us dinosaurs have been using the term 'debugging into existence' for thirty years and I'm not at all sure it was original then. I'm more the obsessive-compulsive sort that likes to stare into the depths of the Matmos until we have the basics - or even full scope - of the answer in our heads before rising from our meditation mats, ritually washing ourselves in the blood of java-weenies, and sinking a few lattés on the way to the keyboard-shrine.

Sure. REPL/Workspace development. Or to be all new-fangled, starting
with a failing test that you debug into existence. (My own
preference.)

But there is still a qualitative difference between being able to
evaluate the expressions in your Workspace whenever you want, and
having them always evaluated automatically. (*) I didn't believe there
would be, but Lightable surprised me even though I "knew" what to
expect. Having said that, there isn't a Lightable mode for emacs, so I
haven't discovered the effect this might have on my programming flow.
(Lightable is, for the moment, only for Clojure, and I do all my
Clojure work in emacs because, well, why would you use anything else?)

frank

(*) I'll ignore the obvious problems of side effects: deleting things
on the file system, launching missiles and the like. In Smalltalk
that's a very, very big problem to solve (because of how baked in side
effects are in the standard libraries, and the code built on the
standard libraries), and we don't have an type/effect system to help
us identify same.


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