One of my favorite places in L.A. is the JUG, that being the Los Angeles Java User Group.
It was there that I heard an excellent presentation on Ruby Rails by a young guru who never leaves the command line but whose rationale for Ruby and Rails was, well, just more Smalltalk. It was at the LA JUG that I heard all the reasons to stay with Smalltalk and Seaside from a Google hacker who was explaining the virtues of the Instantiations GWT kit. As I mistakenly said then,
I was not ready to gwt my day job
But it seems that the path of least resistance to an IDE for Io is not where I expected: it lies in TCL and the expect language.
But wait: is there an IDE for working with TCL while building this IDE for Io?
Let me back up a few steps … you must not diss the cmd line. The ssh command line is our shibboleth. Even as the CRT becomes the LCD, the CRT remains.
It is not enough to explain that whatever the internet was, it is now not accessed from the command line. It is safe to say that almost all internet activity from users begins with an icon, a link in an e-mail ( or, in my case, a link in a pane in OneNote ). But those are users.
There should be a lesson in Japan where it is not enough to have Chinese kanji, each with its Chinese pronunciation and meaning, they must also dup the whole thing and give each a Nihon pronunciation and meaning. And that is not enough. For a language as easy to pronounce as Italian and as easy to read in Romanji as German, there must be alternative alphabets in hiragana and katakana.
Now there are languages which are difficult: Turkish may be one, being even difficult to learn if you are born to it. But there is a limit. Consider only the alphabets proliferated in Sri Lanka. Enter Tcl. Or should I say,
Expect Tcl
Nothing should be as difficult as it now is to create a process under Windows. I will not bore you with it all now, but if you must have async communication and resource sharing between processes you may want to set aside the Win32 SDK and API. Even in Smalltalk.
Consider the admirable CommandShell project for Squeak Smalltalk. The best of this Tcl-ish business lies in the AttachableFileStream and the piped processes. Alas, those pipes are not for anyone inhaling through open Windows.
There was a time and an OS where I thought named pipes were the answer. And only a few hours ago I was thinking that for my needs, pipes would do. And then I was even driven to consider KERMIT.
and an aside.
Kermit is not gone; it has not croaked its last. While I do not remember when I last used kermit, I may have been mistaken to set it aside: kermit can be used to configure communication, either as C-kermit or G-kermit at die.de.
Because Io, the language, is readily embedded, building an IDE should not be an issue. But the IDE that I want must also serve trans and cecil and perhaps slate at the drop of a hat. Or a zip. Or a tar.
( to be continued )
And Tcl, as you may know, is in an active state. Literally. The Perl and Python people at activestate are also one of the centers for Tcl.
