[theamk]

Well, I was responding to specific parent's statement: "Being shackled to existing file-based tools holds you back from improving the software development process." This seems to imply to me that non-file-based tools have some other improvements to software development process.

I think both you and I agree that software development process improves mostly independently from file-based/image distinction. There are no visible ways when files are "holding back" the software development.

[bencoman71]

Everyone sees the world through their own eyes, filtered by what their past and what know.

A peculiar perspective of Smalltalk programmers is to consider that "code in files is dead code". External tools are needed to query it, modify it, compile it.

In Pharo you can evaluate... Integer methods first inspect

and in different tabs you can see this method's source code, the AST, the compiled bytecode.

Or in a similar way we can look at how PLUS is implemented by evaluating (Integer>>#+) inspect

Or look at all the methods that use PLUS

    #+ senders inspect

Within Smalltalk, classes and methods are themselves objects. You can operate on them like any other object. They are ALIVE!!! AHAhahaHaaaaa :)