(Note, I’m not the poster your responding to.) > considering that Eclipse is a direct descendant of IBM's VisualAge Smalltalk environment. I was an active Sma

(Note, I’m not the poster your responding to.) > considering that Eclipse is a direct descendant of IBM's VisualAge Smalltalk environment. I was an active Smalltalker and Java developer in that timeframe and I used both Java and Smalltalk environments. IBM’s titles were "VisualAge for Smalltalk" (VAST) and "VisualAge for Java" (VA Java). They were both built on top of Smalltalk. . In fact, or at least my recollection, the VA Java environment had basically the same code browsers and tools available as the VAST environment, and the word on the street was that building on top of the Smalltalk environment allowed IBM to meet their time-to-market objectives for the Java product. So I have to disagree with the idea that Eclipse is a direct descendant of VisualAge for Smalltalk. The same company was involved, but at best they’re siblings, and really, bastard siblings at that. Eclipse was a "rewrite" of the environment in verb only; it was a new environment in it’s own right and the tools didn’t allow for exploring and debugging existing code, or trying out new code, as well as VA Java did. > I personally loath that style of development because I'm lacking tools to track changes to the product and tools to reproduce the product from a fresh image. Both VisualAge for Smalltalk and Digitalk/V (the first of many subsequent re-writes that avoided Xerox’s licensing fees of Smalltalk-80) could commit "change sets" to an external code repository. Loading those changes to a fresh image would allow reproducing a product predictably, perhaps addressing your objection. I can speak definitively only for the Digitalk/V case, but the resulting image would include the dev tools and for the application, the VM would ensure that only the application code was executed. There was subsequent development (after a merger of Digitalk and it’s competitor, ParcPlace) that would allow creating an application in the more traditional sense, but that was never released. It was rumored that Dolphin Smalltalk had that capability, but that, too, never saw the light of day (as far as I'm aware).