CoExist: overcoming aversion to change

  • Authors:
  • Bastian Steinert;Damien Cassou;Robert Hirschfeld

  • Affiliations:
  • Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany;Inria Paris-Rocquencourt, Paris, France;Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th symposium on Dynamic languages
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Programmers make many changes to the program to eventually find a good solution for a given task. In this course of change, every intermediate development state can of value, when, for example, a promising ideas suddenly turn out inappropriate or the interplay of objects turns out more complex than initially expected before making changes. Programmers would benefit from tool support that provides immediate access to source code and run-time of previous development states of interest. We present IDE extensions, implemented for Squeak/Smalltalk, to preserve, retrieve, and work with this information. With such tool support, programmers can work without worries because they can rely on tools that help them with whatever their explorations will reveal. They no longer have to follow certain best practices only to avoid undesired consequences of hanging code.