Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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Smalltalk

• Fascinating language

• Exploring smalltalk with squeak

• Working log

• Get the pharo launcher

• install libgit2 -- didn't help

• manually copied over libgit2 into the vm for Pharo 8.0

• https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/4463

• Pharo by example

  • Start a "playground" instead of a workspace

• Visualization

  • The book refers to roassal2, which is also outdated (of course)
  • Downloading roassal fails because it probably has the wrong version of libgit available
  • https://github.com/ObjectProfile/Roassal3Documentation/blob/master/documentation/FAQ.md#what-about-the-book-agile-visualization in which the open source project explains that the new version is completely incompatible with the previous version

• Getting libgit to work correctly: install libcurl-gnutls

  • https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/4463

• Thinking about kernels

• The biggest difference is that state in the kernel isn't saved

• the order of execution of the kernel changes everything, unlike in smalltalk

• the kernel of building good, interactive libraries is here

• Ideas I appreciate

• Easy code browser

• Good autocompletion suggestions

• Good syntax highlighting

• Theoretical ability to modify the existing UI with code, because everything is inspectable: it's pretty much the ideal version of my self-modifiable UI for internal tools

• Nice inbuilt examples that can be interacted with

• Inbuilt lint as well

• Auto generated uml diagrams

• Exception debugger is very nicely made

  • Variable inspector
  • Evaluator
  • Source code
  • Stack trace

• inline Ctrl-P to print out an expression, Ctrl-D

• I can also see it persisting all memory and state to the image, making an infinitely long lasting kernel which is a step up on Python notebooks

• The incremental, nested search is amazing and intuitive through spotter

• Things I disliked

• the sheer number of menus, batman!

  • I wouldn't have been able to get started without the introduction
  • can't seem to interrupt, multithreading notwithstanding

• execution is just terrible

• aliasing would be amazing to make it feel less amateur

• Things that were interesting

• doing away with the filesystem completely

  • git interaction is probably fucked
  • this is closer to how we handle models than how we handle code
    • it seemed to have worked out well for a couple of years, at least

— Kunal