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Flat files continue to have a simplicity, portability and fungibility that is difficult (if not folly! :) to walk away from. Instead, there are opportunities t

• stcredzero 17y ago
  As a user of Smalltalk for almost a decade, let me assure you that walking away from source files is not folly! In fact, I get something which is just as nimble and reliable, and yet even more powerful. I can write snippets of code that act like queries into my codebase. With a short script I can rewrite broad swaths of my code with syntactic precision, and with a little work be assured that I have done a perfect refactoring. I can undo/redo all changes. I can even do dangerous things that even bring the VM to a screeching halt, and not lose any code. All of this is enabled by giving up source files and going to a "change log" which is like a transactional log of my changes. You can think of this as something like going from ext2 to ext3, then onto ZFS.