Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by em-bee 28 days ago
your scope of interest seems to have a lot of overlap with mine. though i may be am aiming in a slightly different direction. i am also coming from the MUD world (for my websites i use a platform that has a MUD like architecture underneath :-), and i have a strong interest in a better commandline. i am less focused on exploring languages, that's more of a side quest.

what i really want is a commandline that works more like jupyter notebooks. each command is its own entity, that can be edited and run again. there is an output window/frame separate from the input/command, just like the jupyter. that output can run anything, graphics, an interactive app, like an editor, even a filebrowser. commands can produce structured data that can be interpreted and visualized... (if only i could find funding for this idea :-)

and, yes, i agree, smalltalk has a lot of potential for this. the downside of smalltalk i fear is that it is to bulky for the average user, and this system need to be able to integratable with unix commands written in any language so the interface needs to be agnostic (perhaps json? and another more suitable for binary data, also apps need to be able to run and display output directly to the screen, not depend on pharo to display).

there was a time when i tried using pharo as a desktop. i used a terminal written in smalltalk, and i was looking at finding or building tools a desktop needs (workspace management, a clock, all these small utilities)

if you have something to play around with, i'd be curious to give it a try.