Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndarilek | Hacker News Reader

Silly question, maybe I just can't find the correct keywords to search. Are there any Smalltalks that allow coding/interaction from a text-based console? Maybe line-oriented commands with $EDITOR used for coding? I've wanted to play with these languages for years, but as a blind developer, their inaccessible GUIs thwart me. I'm also a bit confused how they interact with VCSs. Perhaps the answer is obvious when you've played with these environments for a few minutes, but I can't even reach that point. :)

View on HN

Historically, Smalltalk was used to explore the GUI design space, so a non-GUI Smalltalk is somewhere between anachronistic and oxymoronic.

GNU Smalltalk has an Emacs interface:

http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/html_node/Emacs...

I don't know how accessible Emacs is to you, but it should at least be textual.

GNU Smalltalk also has a REPL:

http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/html_node/Getti...

Now, how does a traditional Smalltalk interact with a VCS? Poorly. Smalltalk was all about image-based persistence, with textual source code not being the primary artifact. Philosophically, it was designed to be an environment, and take over the system from soup to nuts.

GNU Smalltalk, predictably, goes its own way, and allows people to load textual source code files from the command line. It also has a more complicated packaging system:

http://smalltalk.gnu.org/wiki/creating-and-distributing-pack...

Pharo (and others) can interact without many problems with any file-format VCS using "filetree" (an file based export source format). There are many of us using it for projects more or less complex (one of them the Pharo VM: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm). So, while we can improve in that area, we are not agnostic :)

Now, you can do scripting with Pharo too, but using console to edit it is so alien for us that we cannot even understand why someone would want to drop a complete development environment (with some really nice tools), just to use a text editor...

Because the text editor is the nicest development environment. It's been customized by me to my workflow, and your not understanding that says horrible things about how well you understand how programmers work.

Frankly, the fact you don't get this means I can't use your product. It promises to be painful to work in.

My understanding is that GNU Smalltalk is text based. http://smalltalk.gnu.org/ I hope that helps.

Shampoo project (http://dmitrymatveev.co.uk/shampoo/) might be useful. It's an Emacs mode for remote Smalltalk development that support GNU Smalltalk and Pharo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com