On 10/29/2010 12:48 PM, Geert Claes wrote:
It sure cares! If the VCS doesn't allow easy integration of code with other kinds of assets (pictures, CSS, schemas expressed as DDL, etc.) and with other people on the team who work on those assets, developers _are_ going to complain.
VCS and source code organization is something that has now become standard across all mainstream languages (i.e. Java and C# :->). Your source code should be saved in class files, in a directory structure that mirrors the package/namespace structure. Other assets are stored and versioned in a similar way. You can use any VCSs with any programming language; indeed, you may be more attached to a VCS than a language. You will use one VCS for a project, but you may use multiple languages. Similar things can be said for IDEs and VMs: you probably pick one and stick to it, although you use multiple languages. People choose a programming environment based on (most important first): 1) what everybody else is using 2) what seems familiar to them 3) what is cool 4) what is good Based on that, it's obvious Smalltalk is not going to succeed in a big way in the foreseeable future. What we need to look at are what areas we lose out on in 2), and could be changed to fit what everybody else is doing, without losing much in 4). To my mind, source code in class files and normal VCS would be doable in Smalltalk, without losing anything major. In contrast, image-based development is a major factor in our competitive advantage, allowing debugging, experimentation etc. It's hard to imagine image-based development with Eclipse or VisualStudio, and implementing Smalltalk on another existing VM is currently too hard, so I'll skip those and focus on the low-hanging fruit. Which Smalltalks (+/- add-on projects) have code in class files, interface with standard VCS, and yet still have an image-based, GUI IDE? And for those that don't, how hard would it be to get there? Steve