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pmuellr is Patrick Mueller

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Thursday, March 01, 2007

browser smalltalk

From Peter Fisk's Almost Smalltalk:

Smalltalk running in Flash is not that far away.

I got goose pimples.

Check out Peter's site, he's got some pretty cool demos up there. On my DE-mentor's advice, I KVM'd over to my sad, bored, win32 desktop, installed the latest .net and ie, so I could run his .net version. Gorgeous. Check out some of Peter's other recent posts for other demos.

But, I'm not sure I'm ready to go back to Smalltalk. Sorry, John. Or Lisp. I've grown attached to using [ ]'s for array access. etc. Although I will admit that I just wrote in a note to someone the othe day that I liked Ruby because "it's Smalltalk in text files". The thing I really miss though, is the Smalltalk browser. An unadorned IDE, that I can fiddle with in the IDE itself.

Ruby and JavaScript are tough customers in that regard, with the amount of wild-west coding going on. JS doesn't even have language-level features to create classes, though you can programmatically create something similiar enough. And Ruby has class extension madness. But maybe we can add a bit of rigour to JS. Define some nicer class definition structures that would be amenable to a browser grokking them, and providing some useful meta information. And from the vista smalltalk work from Peter, doing IDEs in a browser seems quite do-able.

And somehow, this also ties into RESTy resourcey goodness. Somehow.

hmmmm ....

BTW, the image to the right is in my new style of 'flickr pictur with an attribution'. Got the idea to 'inline' the title, owner, license from Mark Pilgrim, and converted my old Ruby commandline program to build the HTML, getf4b, to a Greasemonkey script, getfwa.

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