On: The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)

[andrekandre]

maybe the best we can do is learn from smalltalk, especially the idea of being immersed in the language itself as the "os" where we can make any tools we need when we need them, right out of the environment as if it were pen and paper except its a programming system

think about how we easily make scripts and tools etc in the terminal, now imagine that for your whole os including the gui, it could be very empowering for the average person

[eric4smith → andrekandre]

But we can do that with C. And maybe even easier.

[sebastianconcpt → eric4smith]

You cannot change the form of an object while debugging a thread that halted because that object didn't understood a message you sent with C and then recompile, restart the stack all without killing that thread, can you?

[wtetzner → eric4smith]

It’s not at all the same. In Smalltalk, you can modify your environment in real time.