In Traction

Just a quick update to my previous post. I can imagine that my discussion of the advantages of Smalltalk might be a bit abstract for people who never used it.

So here’s a short demo video of a Solitaire game running in a Smalltalk environment (via David Buck). It clearly illustrates features such as full introspection (e.g. by using the object browser) and live “fix-and-continue” debugging:

I found another video showing live code updates in Smalltalk while invoking native libraries in the background (more specifically, OpenGL):

I think these videos are useful for demonstrating the power of Smalltalk’s environment. On a side note, I discovered Objective-C supports some form of “fix-and-continue” debugging as well.

Takis referred me to a Google tech talk about git by Linus Torvalds.

Although I am more of a bzr advocate (for one because it’s easier to use, and fast enough for me), he gives a good explanation for the need for distributed revision control (which both bzr and git belong to).

Well worth a look.