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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like you shipped your shell, text editor, debugger and more with every program you made in Java. :D
Why would you ship those with a release of a smalltalk application?
I think the most broadly applicable answer now is simply that including those development tools usually requires less-effort than not doing so.
That's a legacy from Smalltalk-80 application development at Xerox Special Information Systems (XSIS, back in the mid 1980s):
— "My response … is to remind the customer that the system is designed so that they can easily and freely change it. This concept is a new one to many people because traditional programming environments carefully protect system code from modification. The Smalltalk-80 environment treats system code and user code alike. Mold the system into an environment that suits your needs. The researchers designed the system so that they could experiment with creating new systems; the changeability of all of the system parts is a necessary attribute of this research."
p501 "Smalltalk - The Interactive Programming Environment", 1984.
Of course, some Smalltalk implementations did things differently:
- Dolphin Smalltalk could ship applications packaged as MSWin dlls
- Resilient Smalltalk used a completely separate Eclipse development environment to connect over TCP/IP to a VM+image embedded-system
> However, some people mistakenly view this as a shortcoming because they believe that the image prevents you from using your favourite programming tools, like Emacs, GitHub, diff, grep, etc. That’s not actually true. Talk about... I'm about to go Frank Grimes here. Images are bad because you want a visible and complete description of your program, not some image with details squirreled away in nooks and crannies. It…
I'm not a fan of the image thing as well, but I suspect it's just a learned behavior. Most of us view code like a book, something to be ready in an orderly fashion. But if you view it like a sculpture, an image is like one. You start with a big block of wood, ice, stone and start chipping away and shaping it into what you wish, anytime you come back to it, you have that same exact block with all the things you have d…
Do authors write books sequentially, first-chapter to last?
Is code used sequentially, only in the same order those procedures are defined in a text-file?
Does the text-file order of procedure definitions help us understand the call sequence?