

Smalltalk and JetBrains Intellij - jamesladd
http://www.redline.st/blog/2011/12/20/road-to-intellij.html

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jhancock
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.

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spooneybarger
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?

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jhancock
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?

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spooneybarger
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>

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jhancock
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.

~~~
spooneybarger
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.

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projectileboy
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.

