I have to be honest: I thought the OP's points were very well made, and as much as I loved the LightTable demo, I think I immediately dismissed it, in my mind, as "looks cool, but can't be made".
As a longtime Smalltalker and contributor to a Smalltalk development tool, I think it is possible, though the odds are long, based on what the LightTable guy doesn't know.
More importantly, I'm an IDE and editor nut. Most of the start of my career was on Visual Studio, then SlickEdit, and since then I've tried out many IDEs and editors. I now mostly use Vim, while sometimes dropping into SublimeText.
I think Eclipse is an amazing tool, and couldn't imagine programming Java without it.
Eclipse has its roots in Visual Age for Java, which for many years was one of the best Java IDEs, and was originally written in Smalltalk. Smalltalkers often have a long view of progress in development environments, because they've witnessed lots of dumbing down of their ideas, which start out woefully inadequate then end up feature complete but hopelessly bloated.
The author of the article talks about finding functions, but offers as a comparison finding classes. This indicates a bias due to an incomplete understanding of how things work in other languages. In Smalltalk, I'm searching for functions all the time. Many times, I only look for a class because it has a certain function.
Several people in the original LightTable thread mentioned that SmallTalk has many of these ideas. I confess that I know nothing about SmallTalk - can you please point me to a description specifically about SmallTalk IDEs and how they do all these things?
I'd suggest as a simple introduction, downloading a copy of "Pharo By Example" and working through everything in it.
Pharo isn't the prettiest of Smalltalk experiences, but
It will give you a glimpse into Smalltalk but really, it takes a good amount of time of use ( for me it was 9 months ) before I really got Smalltalk.
I'd also be completely happy to have an ongoing email conversation where I could answer any questions you have and fill you in on both the good and bad points of the current Smalltalk experience.
As a longtime Smalltalker and contributor to a Smalltalk development tool, I think it is possible, though the odds are long, based on what the LightTable guy doesn't know.
More importantly, I'm an IDE and editor nut. Most of the start of my career was on Visual Studio, then SlickEdit, and since then I've tried out many IDEs and editors. I now mostly use Vim, while sometimes dropping into SublimeText.
I think Eclipse is an amazing tool, and couldn't imagine programming Java without it.
Eclipse has its roots in Visual Age for Java, which for many years was one of the best Java IDEs, and was originally written in Smalltalk. Smalltalkers often have a long view of progress in development environments, because they've witnessed lots of dumbing down of their ideas, which start out woefully inadequate then end up feature complete but hopelessly bloated.
The author of the article talks about finding functions, but offers as a comparison finding classes. This indicates a bias due to an incomplete understanding of how things work in other languages. In Smalltalk, I'm searching for functions all the time. Many times, I only look for a class because it has a certain function.