In exploratory programming, programmers often face a semantic gap between their high-level understanding and the low-level interfaces available for interacting with objects in a system. That is, technical object structure and behavior need to be ...

Scripting environments support exploration from smaller programs to larger systems. From original Smalltalk workspaces to modern Python notebooks, such tool support is known to foster understanding. However, programmers struggle with unforeseen effects ...

This talk presents Tinyrossa, an experimental JIT– and AoT–compilation framework which is part of our larger “Smalltalk-25” program of research towards constructing dynamic-language VMs using formal methods.

As far as compilation per se, Tinyrossa does ...

The OpenSmalltalk-VM is written in a subset of Smalltalk which gets transpiled to C. Developing the VM in Smalltalk allows to use the Smalltalk developer tooling and brings a fast feedback cycle. However, transpiling to C requires mapping ...

Exploration of state and behavior is essential for understanding and debugging object-oriented programs. Many time-related questions about object communication – an object’s history – only arise in the context of a specific error in the here and now. ...

This paper describes a “software archaeology” project in which a new interpreter was created for the Score11 music representation, a popular 1980s music input language that was frequently used with the Music11 non-real-time software sound synthesis ...

Traditional behavior-centric debuggers are organized around an extensive call stack, making it hard for programmers to navigate and explore large programs. We present object traces, a novel, object-centric approach to time-travel debugging that enables ...

We must retain liveness and exploratory practices within the programming systems that make us feel most productive. However, the temptation to just reuse black boxes through limited interfaces is pervasive. We expect time savings and better performance ...

My objective is to create an intuitive computer for laypeople who want to go beyond ready-made apps and create programs to control their electronic environment. I submit Loke, a new kind of computer that is a universe of objects and nothing but ...

This paper presents a personal view of the evolution of six generations of Smalltalk in which the author played a part, starting with Smalltalk-72 and progressing through Smalltalk-80 to Squeak and Etoys. It describes the forces that brought each ...

The roots of Objective-C began at ITT in the early 1980s in a research group led by Tom Love investigating improving programmer productivity by an order of magnitude, a concern motivated by the perceived "software crisis" articulated in the late 1960s. ...

In this paper, I present applying statistical language models to improve code completion in Pharo. In particular, the goal is to use n-gram models for sorting the completion candidates and, in such a way, increase the relevancy of the suggested ...

Creating useful software systems requires a solid understanding of the application domain of the system [1, 9]. Software development teams thus often communicate with domain experts to elicit domain knowledge and requirements for the system [4]. To ...

The software industry has to offer increasingly individualized software for a large number of platforms. In a constantly evolving technical context, the appropriateness and the profitableness of a software has to be ensured earlier, ...

• An approach for prototyping, executing and debugging models of feature-based applications within the modelling environment.

• We present an analysis of existing debugging support for concurrent programs.
• ...

Concurrency issues are inherently harder to identify and fix than issues in sequential programs, due to aspects like indeterminate order of access to shared resources and thread synchronisation. Live debuggers are often used by ...

Language implementation frameworks aim to provide everything that is needed to build interpreters, simplify the process by making certain design decisions in advance, and suggest implementation strategies to virtual machine creators. Truffle, the ...

When engaging in exploratory programming, the activities of exploring, understanding, implementing, and using objects of a particular domain should ideally be tightly interwoven to allow for short feedback cycles and continuous progress towards desired ...

In this critique I argue that the motivations and direction of the `files as directories' idea are sound, but the conceptual difficulties are considerable yet non-obvious, and are not limited to those identified by the author. I highlight a selection of ...

This paper describes the process of designing a logging subsystem for a Smalltalk virtual machine written in C to illustrate a software design methodology focused on promoting reliability and flexibility. The design approach begins with identifying ...

Interactive debuggers are indispensable in many software development scenarios. However, they are often hard to extend and more importantly, their capabilities are limited to an application programming interface (API) provided by the runtime executing ...