I wonder what a Smalltalk-like environment would look like if had been developed in the 2000s instead of the 1970s. If you could marry up the advantages of text/files, live code, visual layouts, data visualization and perhaps machine learning in the future, maybe you could come up with a huge jump in productivity and being able to handle complexity.
If you could marry up the advantages of text/files Is that really such an advantage? What kind of advantage does having source code scattered in files have over Smalltalk's Change Log? The Change Log greatly simplifies having live code, and having a runtime environment where you could crash the system with a runtime change. Source code in text files complicates this. It's also a powerful development tool all by itsel…
Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]
#81The way I see it, plaintext's advantage is much like the iPhone's stylus-less touchscreen - it's much more direct, and people deal with it much more intuitively as a result. Although I'm starting to think that it's more about not coupling the program and data file, and providing documentation (a comment-less plaintext XML file is often not much more useful than a binary file).