Yea, Joe is slowly coming around to the idea of image based development instead of file based development. He's a few decades too late to be original, but it's still a great idea.
Of course, throwing out files has consequences on the tools you use, big time. Ask any Smalltalk'er.
Of course, throwing out files has consequences on the tools you use, big time. Ask any Smalltalk'er.
You can ask me. Who said anything about throwing out files? I use file-based tools all the time. I've grepped files and diffed them. I've exported a Class as a file, done some operation on it with another tool, then filed it back into the image. Whatever tool is best for the job. There's in-image tools, but I'm not limited to them.
Not being shackled to files has tremendous positive consequences. For example, I am free to code in the debugger almost 100% of the time. Even irb and iPython can look a bit restricted in comparison. If I do something esoteric to low-level code and crash the image, there's a transactional log of my code changes I can recover from, almost with impunity.
The choice of text editors for main development is rather restricted, though. (But with a pattern of very short methods as the norm, and the ability to customize the browsers at the level of individual methods, this isn't that big a deal.)
Of course, throwing out files has consequences on the tools you use, big time. Ask any Smalltalk'er.