The VisualAge series from IBM (Instantiations now owns the Smalltalk variant) used a very visual programming metaphor for Smalltalk, C++ and Java. C++ and Java programmers tended to not like the fact that ENVY was used for code, rather than the file system, and that kind of "if you don't act like it's 1978, you're not a real coder) is a big part of the problem in popularizing decent tools. The Java variant was replaced by Eclipse, which initially had about a quarter of the features and used 10x the memory. The C++ variant is I believe only still available on AIX. All of the versions were themselves written in Smalltalk.
-- Andrew Glynn 512-818-3291 Hello, The problem is that in most cases non text editor based IDE are not user- friendly/hard to understand/hard to use. We are moving toward AST based tools software side but it will still be a textEditor for the user interface. I remember there may be something similar to what you are looking for here (Gaucho IDE): http://www.inf.usi.ch/phd/olivero/gaucho/home.html[1] In addition there is the Smart Browser that will be introduced at ESUG (http://vimeo.com/96091089[2]) tht may be related to what you want. People are working on it currently. But perhaps these 2 projects are quite different. 2014-06-11 11:31 GMT+02:00 Matthew Chadwick <p...@celeriac.net[3]>: hello, It's interesting that in Smalltalk, coding is still done via a text editor, not by sending messages to objects (except in the background, parsing & compiling etc). I've been playing with coding by messaging nodes in the AST with a view to coding this way via Roassal graph visualizations of object dependencies combined with some nice graphical tools. Has any work on this way of coding been done before ? What I have in mind is a keyboard-centric, fast system designed as an alternative to the text editor, with a focus on top-down style coding. -------- [1] http://www.inf.usi.ch/phd/olivero/gaucho/home.html [2] http://vimeo.com/96091089 [3] mailto:p...@celeriac.net
