Gaucho: From integrated development environments to direct manipulation environments

Object-oriented programming languages promote reasoning that revolves around objects that send each other messages. To practically make this happen, developers write programs, aided by integrated development environments (IDEs). A modern IDE offers a large number of tools that work on a textual representation of the program. We argue that while modern IDEs –and their many tools– offer powerful means for manipulating source code, at the same time they introduce a barrier between the developer and the concepts under development because they still treat programs as files of text. We present Gaucho, a lightweight development environ-ment we are currently creating, which minimizes the pres-ence of tools and allows the developer to directly manipulate objects. Drawing inspirations from both the Smalltalk and the SELF languages, our goal is to conceive a direct manip-ulation environment (DME) for software. We present the current status of our implementation, discuss its advantages and drawbacks, and delineate our next steps. 1