what I love most about software is that you can always restart from the clean plate (by restarting the program) and/or undo your previous work (with version con

what I love most about software is that you can always restart from the clean plate (by restarting the program) and/or undo your previous work (with version control). That's what I loved best about Smalltalk. You could just hard quit out of the image, then go back to the Change Log and replay all but the last few changes. If you save off an image every day or so, you're always back in minutes, no matter how dangerously you've been coding. There are a variety of utilities which let you load code quickly. Most often, deployment was done using one of these loading onto a clean or a stripped image. You can certainly control changes to your environment. In fact, I'd say you can often control them more easily than in other environments. you have no idea why -- is it a genuine bug or did it happen few minutes ago, when the function was still incomplete? The Change Log makes it very easy to figure that out. All of your ad-hoc "command-line" (do-it) state changes to the image are recorded there as well.