Extreme Development Cycle

Offered as a subjective comparison of Smalltalk without its environment to Smalltalk with its environment.

AnnAnderson and RonJeffries have begun developing an application using PocketSmalltalk, a Smalltalk cross-compiler whose code runs on the 3Com Palm platform. PocketSmalltalk itself is really cool and works quite well.

You have the usual browsers in Smalltalk, then you do a command to generate the code for the Palm. Then you need to unload your previous version from the Palm (or the emulator), then load the code, then run it. This takes less than ten seconds. In "real" Smalltalk, however, it would take zero seconds: you would just push the test button.

There is (as yet) no testing framework for PocketSmalltalk. There is no real debugger: when you get a walkback, you can see the stack but can't inspect the variables. There's no stepping.

GUI changes involve changing a source file for the form, compiling it, then generating the application etc.

There's no source control system, such as Envy.

Our current development speed is between 3x and 5x vs pure Smalltalk. Some of this is probably attributable to inexperience, but lots of it is due, we feel sure, to the clunkiness of the environment. We think it will converge around 3x.

The Smalltalk code is much smaller than the equivalent C code, so the coding will go faster. But nowhere near as fast as in a real Smalltalk.

--RonJeffries