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Original Post: First Impressions
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I downloaded and played with Ambrai Smalltalk this evening. I missed their talk the year they presented in Toronto and wasn't really aware that they were still charging on. I was mistaken.
I followed their demo. A beginner might be a bit puzzled as to what he was supposed to do with the downloaded .st file or how to evaluate code, but it was otherwise pretty straightforward. A basic demonstration of "look we made a difference amongst your other pretty windows."
That didn't take long, so I wandered around the system some. The browser's navigability is pretty primitive, if you're coming from a power tool like VisualWorks, it can feel a little cumbersome. But it's a second beta, so it's pretty impressive. I'd suspect some strong VSE/Dolphin influence or at least similarities. Smalltalks with tight OS integration seem to have a similar feel. Browsing around, I noticed that it seems to be pretty well flushed. But economically spartan at the same time.
Classical <primitive #####> 's are used for the normal Smalltalk primitives (i.e. adding numbers, at:put, etc). But for things like the OS interface (file streams for example), it's written in something more like DLLCC. This I like. I wish more of VisualWorks was implemented in transparent Smalltalk-to-native-library objects, rather than wondering just what the primitive that does a directoryContents really does.
There are no Processes, instead there are Tasks. It would be interesting to learn just what these can do. The number hierarchy is light; it uses double dispatching right off the bat (doesn't even bother to fail the primitive first). IndexedCollection didn't understand at:ifAbsent:, but that was readily fixed, and it worked fine. Even better, getting Symbol to understand value: so that #(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8) collect: #odd works fine was a snap. Growsing around, it seems that it is not the case that a bunch of behavior is hidden behind the scenes (such as the parser/compiler). The debugger is functional enough. It's all there in Smalltalk as it should be.
Just one more thing. One thing I'm pretty fanatical about is code formatting. It's not that I have a style I care about, it's that I'm lazy. I just want to type code and then hit the format button and have it clean it all up for me. I like the uniformity. Whether to terminate or separate with periods is academic past that. So I thought I'd see how hard it would be to add a formatter in. It took about 15 minutes wall time. Which is pretty impressive, considering I'm a stranger in a strange land here. The first mod was to add a line like:
to the BrowserWindow's editMenu method. When I saw this method, I felt very much like I was back in WBPro again. It's a style I'm only beginerishly familiar with. Anway, restarting the browser, my menu item was there. After that, I added the onFormat method to the same class and begin putting braver and braver Transcript show: methods to. I was lucky to discover that there was already SmalltalkColorPrinter, which is a ParseNodeVisitor... you know the pattern. Even luckier after considering copying this to make a Formatter, to see that there was a SmalltalkPrettyPrinter class already. I just needed a convenience method to work off a string and then my onFormat method could be written as:
And then of course, I promptly tested in on itself. And it worked. Pretty nifty. It doesn't preserve comments, and it needs to be smart enough to do the right thing when a class is selected, but it was cinche. I'd gamble those two items would be less than another 30 minutes yet.
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