As anyone who has used Smalltalk knows, one of the main benefits (other than a late-bound language that discourages many poor practices), is that the system is totally transparent and reflective, which makes understanding APIs and existing code easy, and locating functionality pretty easy.
Is there anything that creates a similar environment for Python?
A few examples of features of a smalltalk development environment, not natively found in python are:
- search class/method/etc names,
- examine inheritance hierarchies
- functionality to show the full interface of a given class/object, and where the properties therein originate
- an integrated graphical debugger which allows one to examine the full state of everything in the system, and see every instance of a given type, as well as all threads.
Note that I use windows, so anything that works well on windows would be particularly useful.
Best Answer
Having worked with Smalltalk myself for two years, I can tell you I haven't seen any Python IDE available that will give you the level of expressiveness you are looking for in Smalltalk IDEs such as VisualWorks or Squeak.
The key thing about most Smalltalk IDEs is that code + development tools are stored in the same place. So rather than coding in a text editor, then compiling/interpreting it on a VM, It's all done on the same binary. This has obvious benefits as you could connect to a Smalltalk image in a production environment and start coding/debugging on the image itself rather than having to change then publish a new copy as everything is already there. The main drawback I found with this approach is the amount of memory it consumes. You can obviously strip the image down to remedy this, but that takes time.
I will say that it's not impossible to have a Python IDE that does this, but there simply isn't one available as far as I've seen. Despite the dynamic nature of both languages, the approach to development between both languages different given that Python is file based and Smalltalk is image based.