Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpr | Hacker News Reader

A lot of what he's talking about is done automatically when you're using a classic Smalltalk/Squeak environment.

(E.g., names are in one place. Refactoring can happen automatically, because the IDE can find all uses of a method and fix them.)

View on HN

There's no idea that a single class might have two versions and that some bits of the program depend on the old version and some on the new. Why not? Why isn't live, running code versioned and transactioned so that we can release a patch of a few classes into a running server without taking it down? It should be possible for the old code to handle all of the existing requests and then get garbage collected when it has no further dependencies.

Isn't this also something that Smalltalk can do?

Yes. You can even have the new version get the function that called it and change the implementation of the caller so your code re-factors itself. Not that I'd recommend this, but you could do it =)

It's also something Ruby can do, when running on MagLev.

It is not a coïncidence that MagLev came from the Smalltalk community. See all the other comments here :-)

Most smalltalks ship with method and class-level versioning with browsers. Full discussion of this is here: http://objectmix.com/smalltalk/16421-version-control-systems...

Eclipse is an effort to bring the advancements of smalltalk to java programmers, as the smalltalk community got absorbed by the java borg (see also: hotspot vm history.)

How does that differ from using Eclipse with Java?

(Interesting sidebar: Eclipse is a descends directly from Smalltalk)

Eclipse attempts to bolt-on features external to the runtime to make it appear integrated. The smalltalk implementations offer exactly the kinds of changes you are asking for in your post. see my comment above.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com