[emp]

The IDE is where the super powers are. Like any IDE it just takes a little time. https://pharo.org/ has an online course to get into it. Being in a live system is unlike anything else - the first time a debugger appears and you fix the bug in the debugger and just hit the “continue running” button is a rush. TDD inside the debugger is amazing. And do much more. You really need to experience it, else it just sounds like hot reloading features of current tech.

[gdxhyrd]

> the first time a debugger appears and you fix the bug in the debugger and just hit the “continue running” button is a rush

That is possible in other many other languages, including system ones like C.

[goatlover]

Being that other languages are Turing-complete ...

Which doesn't really mean much when it comes to the standard developer experience and how that differs between programming a live image and the tooling built around that versus manipulating text and the tooling built around that. One lives at the abstraction level of running code and the other at the level of syntax.

[gdxhyrd]

Sorry, but all those are buzzwords.

In C/C++, I can do live debugging, reverse-time debugging, edit-and-continue debugging, multi-device debugging, multi-threading debugging... We also got language servers, on the fly retesting and recompiling, all kinds of profiling... All that with free or open tools readily available, not to mention paid, proprietary ones.

In higher-level languages, fancy features are even more prevalent.

So, what are we missing exactly from Smalltalk?

[coldtea]

You have everything in a subpar way. Smalltalk has it first class.