When I was using Smalltalk in a daily basis I had the chance to understand quite well the things that would make productivity go high. Here are some sketches I’ve done. I didn’t do the debugger and the package manager system, and both of them have great impact on this but hopefully you can imagine how productive this could be.
There are many things we can do to have an Amber Smalltalk IDE that makes the difference in terms of developing experience and productivity. The best ones take a lot of effort that is currently unfunded. Maybe we should start a Kickstart campaign and change that. But in the meantime why not do smaller steps in the right direction? We could do small incremental improvements with what we already have. ...
Using an Announcer can give you a lot of flexibility for making your Amber components interact loosely coupled. And while developing, it is normal to rename a class. Today I was working with a product and I had this announcement class with a typo OrdedProductEditRejected which I’ve renamed to OrderedProductEditRejected. None of the current Amber IDE’s have a refactoring tool to help you to rename globally and changing the methods that are using the class, so you have to go old school and rename in every place yourself.