One of the simplest but more important conclusions that affects me all the time... it’s easy to search for things, but hard to know whether you’ve got all the a

One of the simplest but more important conclusions that affects me all the time... it’s easy to search for things, but hard to know whether you’ve got all the answers you want and hard to know if all the answers you got are answers you want. Smalltalk was wonderful in this regard. If you wanted to search for how something was used, you just right-click search for "senders." If you wanted to find implementors, the same. This big difference occurred with chains of senders. In other languages, where there's 2 or 3 ways to get to something or call something, you have this O(2^n) or O(2.5^n) blowup in the work you have to do to properly follow chains of senders. With Smalltalk, it's just O(n). On top of that, there were tools that could let you compose really sophisticated SQL like queries of the code base, dynamically, then pop that up in a browser.