I still develop in Smalltalk almost daily. It's a very productive environment and a godsend regarding debugging and inspecting live running application. The caveat is nonexistent support on our old version.
Also after having checked various "modern" Smalltalk implementations I have to sadly say that none come close to the experience of the older ones. Maybe Cincom, but that is proprietary. So the whole language and idea is mostly dead.
I’d be interested if you could expand on why the modern Smalltalks feel wrong, because on paper they have more features etc. Not arguing - genuinely interested.
It's probably a personal thing but the main point is this:
- Pharo and Squeak are both one full screen application with their own window manager inside. And that window manager is terrible and slow. I can't even alt-tab between windows. The old "Visual SmallTalk Enterprise 3.1" from 95 leverages all window handling to the OS and is quick and snappy. It also has a native look if that is your thing. This contributes a lot to the developer experience: shortcuts and code completion are quick and snappy, you can easily deal with the separate windows, etc. In Pharo everything is so slow compared to this and not very developer friendly. Maybe someone can show me what I have been doing wrong but this is my main gist.
Dolphin Smalltalk from Object Arts allows alt-tabbing between native windows. The formerly commercial professional version has been released as open source. It is Windows only, but it apparently runs well via Wine on Linux and Mac. Though the executable is 32-bit only, and lightly maintained, it provides an aesthetically pleasing and responsive development environment.
I am guessing that there's not much motivation to change this because of the desire to run anywhere. They can run inside an SDL window on a computer, but, with little modification, you can also get everything running on bare metal, in a browser canvas, or on a mobile device. Visual Smalltalk Enterprise, on the other hand, only ran on Windows.
Personally, I'd welcome something that can do a decent job at cross-platform native-like UI. But I'm not terribly hopeful. As far as cross-platform UI goes, Electron seems to have sucked all the air out of the room.
Yeah I understand it's easier to make it run everywhere but more choices would be nice. Yeah VSE only runs on Windows, that is one of the many negatives about it.
Original Smalltalk was always "full screen" so it is strange to argue this way. Anyway, there are still Dolphin Smalltalk and Smallltalk/X (jv-branch) under active development that use OS windows manager. Pharo will allow working this way soon as well. On the other hand, it has own downsides if you work in multiple images at once and mix their windows together.
Yeah the original was, but many following that weren't "full screen". As I said it's a personal preference. I did hear that Pharo is working on something like that so I hope it will be implemented soon.
I thought that Dolphin was not developed anymore, that is nice to hear. I'll have to check it out again. Which of the two would you recommend?
Also after having checked various "modern" Smalltalk implementations I have to sadly say that none come close to the experience of the older ones. Maybe Cincom, but that is proprietary. So the whole language and idea is mostly dead.