Agreed! The author mentioned Smalltalk and it instantly clicked for me. Having a live programming environment sounds awesome, it sounds like it will fit my thinking pattern better. Then, for production deploy, you drop the editor library from the JAR. It's kinda like stripping the IDE part of a Smalltalk/Pharo image before production deployment.
As much as I want to like Pharo and am amazed by its fast progress, its integration story (to external data source like PostgreSQL) is pretty weak, currently. I'll be tracking the progress of this project to see how it goes, though I've yet to love Clojure.
I want to add that I think it's a beautiful approach to solving the problem; rather than implementing a complicated mechanism for interrogating the application state from a tool running in another process, the author is flipping that around and putting the editor inside application so that it has a very simple access to the application state. Love it.
As much as I want to like Pharo and am amazed by its fast progress, its integration story (to external data source like PostgreSQL) is pretty weak, currently. I'll be tracking the progress of this project to see how it goes, though I've yet to love Clojure.
I want to add that I think it's a beautiful approach to solving the problem; rather than implementing a complicated mechanism for interrogating the application state from a tool running in another process, the author is flipping that around and putting the editor inside application so that it has a very simple access to the application state. Love it.