xkriva11 2026-03-05 08:44 UTC link

From a conceptual point of view, browsing code is like browsing a fractal. Tools must take this into account.

jdougan 2026-03-05 08:47 UTC link

There was a browser that worked on Squeak 3, Whisker, that had some of these attributes. I used it up until it became unsupported. It took a little getting used to as its primary orientation was horizontal, but in the age of widescreen monitors that is an advantage.

Wiki description: https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1993

Archive of its homepage. Has an image of the browser in use. https://web.archive.org/web/20070228113449/http://www.mindsp...

ivanvoid 2026-03-05 10:02 UTC link

when i was in uni in 2014 i learned that smalltalk became obsolete, later i went to industry to see that no one use smalltalk(or prolog) and yet on this site ppl bringing up smalltalk every single month, why is that i wonder

Perenti 2026-03-05 11:05 UTC link

You can run any smalltalk code from workspace-style frames in the Inspector, Workspace, Explorer, Finder and Debugger. You can edit classes and methods in these windows, as well as spawn Browsers as desired. I'm not sure what the integration points are that are lacking. That's not to say there can't be a better way, but I cannot see the point he is making.

zarzavat 2026-03-05 11:14 UTC link

I fondly remember the browser in F-script Anywhere was fantastic for debugging your own apps and reverse engineering other people's.

Smalltalk is how computing should have been: an open book. I hope that one day we can rediscover that magic, we surely have the computing power available to do so.

https://www.chromium.org/developers/f-script-anywhere/

Smalltalker-80 2026-03-05 11:46 UTC link

Imo, the problem with the 4-pane browsers are: 1 - The left-most 'package' pane is a flat list. And there are 10K + classes in e.g. Pharo. There are 900+ (!) packages in Pharo, in the pane, so its not easy to scroll through. This is solved 'manually' by have a hierarchical naming of packages. I think this pane should just have tree view. 2 - When developing an app, you may be working on classes in multiple packages. You want to have 'project' view with a simple way of switching between them, without having 10+ system browser windows open, like shown in the article. Dolphin Smalltalk has implemented this concept. Shameless plug: SmallJS (https://small-js.org) has these too..

brazzy 2026-03-05 12:22 UTC link

Do Smalltalk IDEs really not have the concept of different "views" of the code? The 4-pane hiearchical view is clearly valuable, but why would it need to be "surpassed" rather than complemented by other views that are available when needed and can be switched to or even shown alongside the traditional view?

If that kind of thing doesn't exist (and the article sure sounds like that), then yes, it appears the smalltalk ecosystem really has fallen decades behind the state of the art in the IDE area.

mark_l_watson 2026-03-05 15:32 UTC link

While the article makes good points, I simply find it amazing that a programming user interface (with small changes) has been around for so long: I think kit was in 1983 that Xerox Special Information Systems provided me with a free 1 month Smalltalk license for my Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine. That Smalltalk interface is amazingly similar to Pharo Smalltalk which I still occasionally use.

sebastianconcpt 2026-03-05 16:15 UTC link

I'm unable to like anything offering me to observe the library with something different than a hierarchy.

Abstractions have to be earned.

Abstractions have to be exposed so they can be either questioned or exuding their properly valued and time tested structural ontology.

In 2015 I wrote how a cool Smalltalk IDE in a web browser would be:

https://blog.sebastiansastre.co/posts/the-smalltalk-ide-i-wi...

atgreen 2026-03-05 17:03 UTC link

I set out to create a better text repl experience for Common Lisp couple of months ago, but was inspired by the pharo interface and built something much larger: https://atgreen.github.io/icl/ I use it all the time.

shevy-java 2026-03-05 18:12 UTC link

I kind of want those things for ruby. Not as an exclusive thing, but something to add-on onto at all times. Objects everywhere.

> Why has the four-pane browser survived so long without being replaced by newer (possibly better) metaphors?

Smalltalk died though. The ideas may persist but smalltalk is a dead language really.

cratermoon 2026-03-05 18:46 UTC link

The best feature of the Smalltalk browser is that there's no such thing as a 'file' in the organization of the code. I get that we have to have files and directories as operating systems use that concept, but it really doesn't make sense to be constrained organize code that way. In particular, tying visibility and module organization to "what file is in what directory" introduces an abstraction useless for source code.

john1203 2026-03-10 05:39 UTC link

Smalltalk does not need new system browsers; rather, it needs to be updated with the tools and developments being made in the world today.

It is sad to see how many people have been developing with Smalltalk for so many years and still cannot escape the bubble of always revisiting the same issues.

radiowave 2026-03-05 09:03 UTC link

Yes, Whisker is exactly what came to mind for me as well.

I don't currently use Smalltalk, most of my code is now written (and read) in vscode. The means available for showing the context around the code under consideration (splitting and resizing panes, hunting through lists of tabs, scrolling around) feel pretty crude by comparison.

rwmj 2026-03-05 09:49 UTC link

Also it'd be nice to have something that is more spatial. A famous memory technique is remembering where things are in space[1], but I've never seen a code browser that works spatially. (I have no idea how to actually do this.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

bear8642 2026-03-05 10:09 UTC link

Likely because whilst it didn't work out commercially, the ideas smalltalk, prolog and other more esoteric languages (forth, apl) focus on are themselves very interesting.

morphle 2026-03-05 10:13 UTC link

The Potsdam university (near Berlin, Germany) and Hasno Platner Instute [1] has been actively teaching and researching Squeak Smalltalk for decades. Same in Buenos Aires and several other places. Science papers every month for 5 decades, under many names besides Smalltalk. Weekly online conferences, presentations.

https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/projects/index.htm...

smackeyacky 2026-03-05 11:20 UTC link

I couldn’t discern a point either. Having been a smalltalk programmer the only thing I really miss is the exceptions and the way they could be intercepted and a value injected back into the execution flow.

I’m sure we could code up a class browser for any language that offers introspection like C# but I don’t see the point any more when programming has reverted to functional styles or chunks of lambda expressions.

conartist6 2026-03-05 11:26 UTC link

Yeah there's a difference between being popular and influential. Smalltalk is influential without being all that popular.

I suspect that's largely because most smalltalk implementations don't store code in git. "A smalltalk" is more like a Linux distro than a phone app. It's almost like the main purpose of a smalltalk is to build more smalltalks. It's a good way for developers to build a deep, powerful tool for other developers, but it's a less good way to build user experiences targeted at non-programmers, who are going to want to have a bunch of different apps to use not a bunch of different operating systems to use.

Good economics for the classroom; bad economics for the real world. Then and now, though, a great way to play with novel ideas in programming languages.

zabzonk 2026-03-05 12:27 UTC link

People like the language - I like it though I have only written a few bits and bobs in it. They also like Fortran, Prolog, and (dare I say it) Haskell, and many others that don't appear here so often. Just because a language is not this week's hotness (looking at you Rust) does not make it "obsolete".

LoganDark 2026-03-05 13:12 UTC link

I think I'd prefer a pane view over a tree view because the higher levels retain their scroll position even as I browse beneath. Is there a similar UX possible for tree views?

cess11 2026-03-05 13:31 UTC link

While I agree that the package column has room for improvement, some of the 'largesse' can be handled by the search field at the bottom of it, and once you get to doing something serious you could set up your own image and ditch a lot or most of the standard distribution.

cess11 2026-03-05 13:37 UTC link

In what way, obsolete? There is quite a bit of worthwhile research done in Smalltalk-related languages and some corporations are quite successful in building on such languages.

It's not dominant in the way of Wordpress but also not insignificant.

projektfu 2026-03-05 14:48 UTC link

Extending that, an outliner can be a great way to deal with this stuff. The problem becomes the self-referential nature of OO systems. Outliners are good when you get to the method of interest, but then you have the problem of browsing senders and implementers.

Still, there's nothing worse than a Smalltalk without a class category list. Smalltalk/MT, for example, just had a class hierarchy browser, and the category class member variable was left blank. I found it very hard to know where to start looking for behavior.

projektfu 2026-03-05 14:50 UTC link

They have many views, the trouble is the proliferation of these views as you go through the code. You browse to a class and method, then you want to see the senders, and so you open that, and then see the implementors of a method a sender calls, and so on.

https://blog.lorenzano.eu/content/images/2026/01/Pasted-imag...

paddybyers 2026-03-05 15:14 UTC link

Who remembers the Occam folding editor (1983)? This was the first time I saw this kind of outline-based navigation for code: https://www.transputer.net/tn/03/tn03.html#x1-30002

pjmlp 2026-03-05 15:36 UTC link

Eclipse, due to its evolution from Visual Age set of IDEs, coded in Smalltalk, also keeps a code browser view for Java that is like the Smalltalk one.

arnsholt 2026-03-05 15:39 UTC link

I worked as a Smalltalk developer for a few years, and it spoiled to such an extent that I’ve tried to make an extension for IntelliJ to replicate the browser for Java development. Maybe I should revive that project, actually…

neilv 2026-03-05 16:29 UTC link

Historically, Smalltalk has many browsers (views). This System Browser is one of many browsers, and the most busy-looking.

You can browse within it, and also spawn off other kinds of browsers from it.

And these browsers are extensible with others. As someone new to Smalltalk, I was pretty easily able to add a visual class hierarchy browser into this environment:

https://www.neilvandyke.org/smalltalk-chg/

Half the things we know or think about in HCI, the people at PARC figured out before we were born, and sometimes before the hardware to test it existed.

https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

whartung 2026-03-05 16:47 UTC link

Whenever I tried dabbling in Smalltalk, I would feel constrained by the system in terms of raw real estate. I never cared to view the system through the narrow slit of the method code editor. I would suffer the explosion of windows. All of it was off putting to me, and I never pushed through it to work with a project long enough in order for it to be comfortable.

But, let's contrast it to Java, which pretty much is in the same boat as a modern Smalltalk. A very large core system of packages, classes, and methods. Wrapped in a spider web of dependencies. And, granted, I've been working with Java a long time, and this is all quite comfortable to me. But at the same time, it doesn't suffer the issues that the Smalltalk browser presents.

Consider, regarding the parent point, the entirety of the JDK is not typically presented in the modern IDE. It's just back there. There's no real estate committed to it. There's your project (typically), with its classes.

I use NetBeans, so I have a project view of packages and classes, I have code tabs of individual classes, and a contextual method navigator within a class.

Its routine to potentially have a tab explosion, in contrast to a window explosion when exploring code. But when I do that, all I get is the code window, not the entire project or context of the class.

That is, in my code, I can click on, say, an ArrayList method, and jump to the JDK source code for the method within the ArrayList. I don't get its entire package hierarchy, I get its method list (uncatagorized, but alphabetical) while viewing the code file. So, the impact of viewing a new method is minimal -- it's just a new tab.

But as a benefit, I get to see not only the method I'm interested in, but I get to see the context of the code around the method. When I code, I don't write methods in a vacuum. I organize my code somewhat around aspect of the logic of the class. So, if there's a method that does one thing, chances are that the methods around it are doing similar or related things, or part of the logic of whats going on. Proximity in the source file tells part of the story not captured at the method level.

Sure, I can click around, in the navigator, in the IDE directly to visit other methods, but I can also scroll about, have the breadth of the class as a canvas and gather the ebb and flow of the logic within it. This is stark contrast to the ST "tiny" method browser.

I can also search globally within the source methods rather than just method signatures, while still having access to call trees and references and many of the other wonders of the ST browser.

glompers 2026-03-05 17:43 UTC link

Longtime HN user morphle, who commented elsewhere in this thread, has researched and designed chips and hardware for that purpose (edit: for scaling that form of computing). He has been trying to find funds and partners to bring them to market.

Disclaimer: never met or spoken or worked with him

Frolo 2026-03-05 17:46 UTC link

this is great! i was on a common lisp exploration a few months ago and mostly got stuck wishing i had smalltalk style tooling

dharmatech 2026-03-05 18:01 UTC link

Very cool!

Just saw your post to the Common Lisp reddit.

Consider also posting to the larger Lisp reddit.

Frolo 2026-03-05 18:01 UTC link

smalltalk invented the concept of views

cenamus 2026-03-05 18:50 UTC link

The browser inspector stuff looks very interesting, gotta check this out!

wk_end 2026-03-05 19:45 UTC link

Rather than a fixed 4-pane browser, a potential solution is to use something like the macOS finder's "Column" view, where each layer of the hierarchy produces a new pane, as many as you need to drill down to the particular thing you're looking for.

jdougan 2026-03-06 06:55 UTC link

Have you looked at the tooling in Genera or other lisp machines?

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