4 ms·

It's like you shipped your shell, text editor, debugger and more with every program you made in Java. :D

• detaro 7y ago
  Why would you ship those with a release of a smalltalk application?
  • igouy 7y ago
    Quite a good question. 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