Gilad Bracha is one of the Smalltalk luminaries (his dialect is called Newspeak) and so he's really alluding to the ST way of doing things, where textual code i

Gilad Bracha is one of the Smalltalk luminaries (his dialect is called Newspeak) and so he's really alluding to the ST way of doing things, where textual code is instantly compiled to machine-code or JIT-ed ... he's basically against the idea of a compiler as a separate binary that spits out an executable. I believe that's why he goes on about 'live-ness' which is a very smalltalk concept of a "live-image" of the running program. I doubt what he means is directly translatable to the Javascript world, although perhaps a running browser with JS in it can considered to be the live-image (like, say, the Clojurescript/React/Figwheel way of working). But as you note, in the JS-dev world, very often you do need to reboot and start again (say if an external resource like a CSS has changed).