> I've never known the magic of the image (or a Lisp machine), so I lack an opinion on which is superior. None of the Lisp machines really had image-based deve

> I've never known the magic of the image (or a Lisp machine), so I lack an opinion on which is superior. None of the Lisp machines really had image-based development. The MIT ones all had an Emacs that worked on text source files. You'd boot into a system image, but that was more like a kernel binary, than the Smalltalk image with a class browser. Interlisp had a structured editor that worked on s-expressions in memory, kind of like the Smalltalk class browser, but these were saved to files (the system would automatically track which definitions were saved in which files, and could tell you about changes: http://larry.masinter.net/interlisp-ieee.pdf http://larry.masinter.net/interlisp-ieee.pdf).