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by ubertaco
3326 days ago
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Here's the thing: guided, interactive refactoring is not the same as automatic refactoring. If I can hit a button to inline all usages of a method (as in IntelliJ), that's not the same as using a tool that can point out candidate locations for inlining what might be the method. Furthermore, the reason Smalltalk pulled all this off is because it is/was metadata-heavy. Every object could be interrogated about its shape and capabilities (in the form of asking about its "slots"), even though there were no static type annotations. It's sorta like the runtime-typing stuff done by Dialyzer in the Erlang/Elixir world nowadays, and the tooling and code all ran together in the same runtime/VM instance. Clearly this is not the case for Python, Ruby, or Javascript, where the tooling runs in a separate process from the code, and there's very little metadata that tooling can query without just up and executing the whole program. In fact, this particular lack of metadata is why PEP-484 exists (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/) adding "type annotations" that are really just runtime metadata hints. So no, a language without static typing or metadata is not as tooling-friendly as a language with such requisite available analyzable information, and certain categories of refactoring cannot confidently be done automatically. Smalltalk was not as "loose" as Javascript or Python, not by a long ways. The level of metaprogramming it was capable of was only enabled by the level of metadata it made available to its hybrid, in-process runtime/design-time tooling. |
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Javascript objects are inspectable and modifiable in exactly the same way as Smalltalk objects are. All browsers support this today.
This inspection capability has nothing to do with static/dynamic typing.
> So no, a language without static typing or metadata is not as tooling-friendly as a language with such requisite available analyzable information, and certain categories of refactoring cannot confidently be done automatically.
Yes, they are. You can do anything with IDEA/Eclipse + Java that you could do in Smalltalk + IDE.