Smalltalk was introduced not only as the first fully Object-oriented language, but also as a completely different programming experience in the form of an integrated development environment (IDE). Nowadays programmers make extensive use of the many tools offered by IDEs. We argue that current modern IDEs are based on the notion that programming is writing, as opposed to modeling. Therefore, drawing inspiration from the SELF language, our goal is to conceive a next generation development environment for Smalltalk, where developers directly interact with the abstractions that make up a software system. We believe that it is time again for the Smalltalk community to fundamentally change how we model our programs. In this talk we will present the current status of our implementation, discuss its advantages and drawbacks, and delineate our next steps.
I'm Fernando Olivero, a Ph.D Student of the University Of Lugano. I've been using Smalltalk for the past 6 years, i've worked in the industry and did my master thesis using this marvelous language. Nowadays as part of my doctoral thesis, together with my advisor Michele Lanza, we are working on Gaucho.