[fractallyte]

> many parts of the Smalltalk IDEs are horribly outdated

My opinion is the opposite: I find the IDE in Pharo to be simple and very elegant, far more human-friendly than any I've seen in 'mainstream' languages. And this version of Smalltalk is under heavy development, with a push towards even greater cohesion. This small corner of computing is seething with hot, cutting-edge activity.

> The text editors are pretty bad

Well, you ought to know that Smalltalk is focused on relatively small snippets of code, held together in consistent OO structures. There's hardly any point in fancy text-editing features when your methods are generally 8-12 lines long!

[bromagosa]

> Well, you ought to know that Smalltalk is focused on relatively small snippets of code, held together in consistent OO structures. There's hardly any point in fancy text-editing features when your methods are generally 8-12 lines long!

This! And also, in Pharo 3.0 there's being a huge push towards better text editing, although I've never ever needed more than what Pharo 1.0 did already provide...

You don't work with text in Smalltalk.

[tikhonj]

Just because you have shorter methods does not mean you would not benefit from Emacs-like power. I use Haskell--which has even shorter functions, often half that length--and yet I still find Emacs exceptionally useful.

Any amount of text is still text, and Emacs excels at text editing.