Smalltalk and JetBrains Intellij | Hacker News Reader

Smalltalk and JetBrains Intellij

redline.st

17 pointsjamesladd7 comments

ok, I upvoted this simply because it had Smalltalk in the title. However, I have to chastise the author for not really saying much except he wants people to throw their vote into some support with zero detail on why IntelliJ makes any sense as a Smalltalk IDE. IDE, in the traditional Smalltalk sense, doesn't have the same meaning as it does for IntelliJ's other languages.

We're working on an implementation of smalltalk that runs on the jvm and integrates into ecosystem. That context was assumed to be previous knowledge but I can see how it might not be.

I just updated the post before I head out to work with more background. Can you let me know if you think it addresses your general concerns?

Don't see your update yet. But telling me that redline is running on JVM bytecode, is on its own, only mildly interesting. What evidence/argument do you have that Smalltalk without a traditional Smalltalk dev environment is any more interesting than a scripting language like Ruby?

By traditional "Smalltalk dev environment", I assume you mean an image. If that isn't correct, then my entire response isn't going to be off base.

We are currently aiming for file based support with optional image support coming later down the road. Even in a file based system, we will have resumable exceptions and reloadable classes with the image.

The website is very much a work in progress, we do have a page up that attempts to answer some: 'Why the JVM' questions.. FAQ for things like 'Will you support an image' is still coming.

http://www.redline.st/discover/why-the-jvm.html

Your "Why the JVM" info is solid. Your argument starts with "Joining the number #1 virtual machine with the number #1 language for getting things done is an easy choice." I will assert that Smalltalk is the #1 lang for getting things done because of its toolset/image. I'm not sure you get much value until you get to this point.

There are plenty who feel as you do and plenty who don't. For people who feel as you do, we are going to be working on making sure that Pharo or another Smalltalk ( probably Pharo ) could be used as a development environment and Redline would be a deployment platform much like how many people develop for Gemstone's GLASS environment.

Why not write your own language plugin, and then let JetBrains take it over? That's what me and another group did for Clojure. The language plugin API for IntelliJ is very nice. It's not documented very well, but it's easy to get help from the IntelliJ language plugin community.

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