There was a browser that worked on Squeak 3, Whisker, that had some of these attributes. I used it up until it became unsupported. It took a little getting used to as its primary orientation was horizontal, but in the age of widescreen monitors that is an advantage.
Yes, Whisker is exactly what came to mind for me as well.
I don't currently use Smalltalk, most of my code is now written (and read) in vscode. The means available for showing the context around the code under consideration (splitting and resizing panes, hunting through lists of tabs, scrolling around) feel pretty crude by comparison.
Also it'd be nice to have something that is more spatial. A famous memory technique is remembering where things are in space[1], but I've never seen a code browser that works spatially. (I have no idea how to actually do this.)
The paper printouts on the table are a kind of simple spatial browser. Thanks to this, we have UNIX (at least it explains how they were able to create anything at all with just a teletype back then).
To add to this, a quote from an article about the editor ed:
It’s important to realize that in ed you were usually editing a file you had already printed beforehand. If you only wanted to fix a few small things in a multi-page listing, you simply entered the corrections in ed on the relevant lines, added something here and there, and at the same time you would just write the simple minor fixes directly into the printout by hand-without having to tediously retype everything.
You had the files on paper, which is a very pleasant and ergonomic medium for reading. You can literally surround yourself with it, cover your desk, and easily move your eyes between dozens of functions. If you learn to keep order and stay oriented in that mountain of paper, you can be very effective.
Moreover, from an ergonomic point of view you wouldn’t be doing badly at all. Printed paper in natural light is definitely easier on the eyes than low-refresh-rate screens in the years that followed. Paper lets you quickly add notes, sketch a little graph, basically work in a very natural way - one people were used to back then from the moment they first held a crayon.
Most of the time a programmer isn’t writing code but reading it. In that respect, people back then may actually have had it better than we do today. When it did come to writing, the only truly more complicated part was essentially making corrections. The history of everything you’d done was right there on paper. I don’t want to idealize the way they worked back then, but all of this explains how they were able to work effectively even with such primitive tools.
when i was in uni in 2014 i learned that smalltalk became obsolete, later i went to industry to see that no one use smalltalk(or prolog) and yet on this site ppl bringing up smalltalk every single month, why is that i wonder
Likely because whilst it didn't work out commercially, the ideas smalltalk, prolog and other more esoteric languages (forth, apl) focus on are themselves very interesting.
The Potsdam university (near Berlin, Germany) and Hasno Platner Instute [1] has been actively teaching and researching Squeak Smalltalk for decades. Same in Buenos Aires and several other places. Science papers every month for 5 decades, under many names besides Smalltalk. Weekly online conferences, presentations.
Wiki description: https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1993
Archive of its homepage. Has an image of the browser in use. https://web.archive.org/web/20070228113449/http://www.mindsp...
I don't currently use Smalltalk, most of my code is now written (and read) in vscode. The means available for showing the context around the code under consideration (splitting and resizing panes, hunting through lists of tabs, scrolling around) feel pretty crude by comparison.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
It’s important to realize that in ed you were usually editing a file you had already printed beforehand. If you only wanted to fix a few small things in a multi-page listing, you simply entered the corrections in ed on the relevant lines, added something here and there, and at the same time you would just write the simple minor fixes directly into the printout by hand-without having to tediously retype everything.
You had the files on paper, which is a very pleasant and ergonomic medium for reading. You can literally surround yourself with it, cover your desk, and easily move your eyes between dozens of functions. If you learn to keep order and stay oriented in that mountain of paper, you can be very effective.
Moreover, from an ergonomic point of view you wouldn’t be doing badly at all. Printed paper in natural light is definitely easier on the eyes than low-refresh-rate screens in the years that followed. Paper lets you quickly add notes, sketch a little graph, basically work in a very natural way - one people were used to back then from the moment they first held a crayon.
Most of the time a programmer isn’t writing code but reading it. In that respect, people back then may actually have had it better than we do today. When it did come to writing, the only truly more complicated part was essentially making corrections. The history of everything you’d done was right there on paper. I don’t want to idealize the way they worked back then, but all of this explains how they were able to work effectively even with such primitive tools.
https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/projects/index.htm...