When developing in Smalltalk, you're editing class definitions and method definitions meant to run sometime in the future but can evaluate the class definitions

When developing in Smalltalk, you're editing class definitions and method definitions meant to run sometime in the future but can evaluate the class definitions and method definitions on the fly. … But also, there is a clean separation between your permanent code and your temporary changes. … The proper form of your analogy is that you want to chip away at your code, not at text scattered among files. The lively computation is the advantage here (in Smalltalk), not the fact that there is an image. The image just makes the lively computation persistent.