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Tackling Software Navigation Issues of the Smalltalk IDE
"... The IDE used in most Smalltalk dialects, including Pharo, Squeak and Cincom Smalltalk, did not evolve significantly over the last years, if not to say decades. For other languages, for instance Java, the available IDEs made tremendous progress as Eclipse and Net-Beans illustrate. While the Smalltalk ..."
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The IDE used in most Smalltalk dialects, including Pharo, Squeak and Cincom Smalltalk, did not evolve significantly over the last years, if not to say decades. For other languages, for instance Java, the available IDEs made tremendous progress as Eclipse and Net-Beans illustrate. While the Smalltalk IDE served as an exemplar for many years, other IDEs caught up or even overtook the erstwhile leader in terms of feature-richness, usability and code navigation facilities. In this paper we first analyze the difficulty of software navigation in the Smalltalk IDE and second illustrate with concrete examples the features we added to the Smalltalk IDE to fill the gap to modern IDEs and to provide novel, improved means to navigate source space. We show that thanks to the agility and dynamics of Smalltalk, we are able to extend and enhance with reasonable effort the Smalltalk IDE to better support software navigation, program comprehension, and software maintenance in general. One such support is the integration of dynamic information into the static source views we are familiar with. Other means include easing the access to static information (for instance by better arranging important packages) or helping developers locating artifacts of interest.
IWST’09 Draft Submission Proposals for the Reborn Pharo Developer
"... Smalltalk was at the birth of current IDEs. Current Smalltalk IDEs, however, lost their abilities to adapt to developer needs (edit and jump, back button, auto-completion,...). Therefore while offering a powerful sets of tools current Smalltalk IDEs looks clunky and often lacks the application of a ..."
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Smalltalk was at the birth of current IDEs. Current Smalltalk IDEs, however, lost their abilities to adapt to developer needs (edit and jump, back button, auto-completion,...). Therefore while offering a powerful sets of tools current Smalltalk IDEs looks clunky and often lacks the application of a consistent set of guidelines. In this paper we sketch some possible IDEs future features or reorganization.

