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Comment by 0x445442 | Hacker News Reader

I love ST the language, I like ST the image but I hate the tight coupling to the antiquated UI. I know there’s GNU ST but I wish there were more options. I also wonder how difficult it would be to create a modern IDE integration with GNU ST with something like IntelliJ, Eclipse, Net Beans or VS Code.

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I'm looking at it myself from the other end: one of the most interesting ideas from Smalltalk, Oberon, Plan9, etc. was having text be executable as programs in a text editor. It's to a visual editor as a command line shell is to a line editor.

I've heard it called an 'integrating development environment,' a system where all the tools to use it like an IDE are there.

EDIT: OP has a blog post showing the similarities between the mentioned systems: https://www.multicores.org/blog/what-have-i-been-up-to.html

I can recommend Stephen Kell's publications on this topic, e.g. "Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk": https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/research/papers/kell19unix-...

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwicN2u6Dro

More on Stephen's research can be found at https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/

I’m fairly confident executable text as well the other functionality of current smalltalk systems can be implemented within a modern IDE framework. What needs updating are the UI components, views, layout, etc. For example, I can envision a left hand tree component for the display of packages/classes/protocols/methods the same way it’s done for for almost every other language.

Could the modern IDE paradigm be approximated within current Smalltalks? Probably, but pulling that off in Squeak or Pharo seems like the wrong approach. Also, deployment of server side applications is more cumbersome in Squeak or Pharo than with GNU Smalltalk.

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