Malcolm: Usability improvements in GCC 8 [LWN.net]

Malcolm: Usability improvements in GCC 8

Posted Mar 16, 2018 19:04 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
In reply to: Malcolm: Usability improvements in GCC 8 by ledow
Parent article: Malcolm: Usability improvements in GCC 8

> In a way, you could make an entire programming language based on that. Start with a blank sheet. Query it. When it asks what you expect, draw a button on the screen. It now knows to draw a button. Now click the button. Nothing happens. Click the ? and point at the button. Scroll back through all the mouse moves and clicks it detected. What were you expecting on the button click? The *dropdown select* colour of this *click* window to turn *click* this colour. Now it does it.

Congrats, you invented smalltalk!

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Malcolm: Usability improvements in GCC 8

Posted Mar 17, 2018 13:03 UTC (Sat) by orsayman (guest, #123153) [Link] (3 responses)

> Congrats, you invented smalltalk!

I was about to say the same thing ! Those smallatalkers do amazing things (like debugging Python code inside Smalltalk).

Malcolm: Usability improvements in GCC 8

Posted Mar 17, 2018 14:34 UTC (Sat) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link] (2 responses)

Really? I don't think the below has any correlation whatsoever with my description.

exampleWithNumber: x
| y |
true & false not & (nil isNil) ifFalse: [self halt].
y := self size + super size.
#($a #a "a" 1 1.0)
do: [ :each |
Transcript show: (each class name);
show: ' '].
^x < y

Maybe we have "programmer-syndrome" again, like whoever originally did the error messages for gcc, where because it's technically possible to figure out what's going on that must be good enough?

Malcolm: Usability improvements in GCC 8

Posted Mar 18, 2018 2:59 UTC (Sun) by nivedita76 (guest, #121790) [Link]

This from the wiki page:
An example of how Smalltalk can use reflection is the mechanism for handling errors. When an object is sent a message that it does not implement, the virtual machine sends the object the doesNotUnderstand: message with a reification of the message as an argument. The message (another object, an instance of Message) contains the selector of the message and an Array of its arguments. In an interactive Smalltalk system the default implementation of doesNotUnderstand: is one that opens an error window (a Notifier) reporting the error to the user. Through this and the reflective facilities the user can examine the context in which the error occurred, redefine the offending code, and continue, all within the system, using Smalltalk-80's reflective facilities.[23][24]

Malcolm: Usability improvements in GCC 8

Posted Mar 26, 2018 5:23 UTC (Mon) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link]

Here, this video might help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw&t=137s

A retrospective on what smalltalk could do in the mid 70s.