I have a question to people who used smalltalk. Maybe I have read it somewhere but couldn't understand the unique advantage in modern day terms.
What is so different in smalltalk that is not possible / easy in modern IDE+Debugger environments? Especially those with hot reload or 'Edit & Continue' features?
You have access to the full stack, whereas even on .NET and Java there is a certain separation between runtime and lets call it user space.
On a proper Smalltalk environment, beyond a set of pre-defined VM intrinsics you can access and change everything, GC, JIT compiler, compiler, how the debugger works, IDE like features, you name it. Then it is very uniform, everything is an object, even it isn't implemented as such, it is transparent for your as developer.
The only other kind of environments that went as far were the Interlisp-D and Lisp Machines, to some extent the surviving commercial Common Lisps.
What is so different in smalltalk that is not possible / easy in modern IDE+Debugger environments? Especially those with hot reload or 'Edit & Continue' features?