More often than not, these interactive / interpreted environments feel like Smalltalk by installment.
This is actually a law: Whenever someone brings up any kind of interactive programming environment, no matter how much it does not resembles Smalltalk or Lisp, someone will always say it completely resembles Smalltalk or Lisp with no significant improvement. We call it the "smug smalltalk/lisp weenie" syndrome. BTW, Smalltalk supports hotswapping without the liveness of course. There is nothing in smalltalk that allo…
No smugness intended, sorry. I only ever toyed with it. I am genuinely curious why e.g. Squeak never caught on with the artsy types considering it has many but by no means all of the interactivty and feedback that is desirable in these spaces. And again Squeak at least tried to position itself as a media-rich system. Perhaps performance always has primacy. And I don't seem to follow your point regarding liveness -- a language that supports many aspects of live programming but requires a supporting loop is of no value? That does seem like a very strong criticism.