I don't know much about Smalltalk, but this IDE/VM approach must be damn substantive to make up for not using Vim.
The thing about the IDE, is that there's hardly any of it there. It's all just objects that each effectively have their own REPL, and you're directly manipulating all of them.
You can actually start writing a debugger in most Smalltalk environments, and you'll have something that lets you browse a stack trace in under 5 minutes. (If you know the API for dealing with stack traces. A newb or someone out of practice will take longer, but most of it will be reading the API.)
An engineer I know was bored in his "Intro to Smalltalk" class and spent 10 minutes writing a tool that compiles and evaluates code. The exact same code made it into the production "IDE" and was there for over a decade.
The thing is, there's such an amazing amount of "integration" in the environment, you'd think there was tons of ingenious code written by teams of geniuses, but there isn't. It's just that a lot of unnecessary stuff has been removed and made runtime, so everything is available for you to see and change.
It's one of the best examples of how minimalism can work very well.
The thing about the IDE, is that there's hardly any of it there. It's all just objects that each effectively have their own REPL, and you're directly manipulating all of them.
You can actually start writing a debugger in most Smalltalk environments, and you'll have something that lets you browse a stack trace in under 5 minutes. (If you know the API for dealing with stack traces. A newb or someone out of practice will take longer, but most of it will be reading the API.)
An engineer I know was bored in his "Intro to Smalltalk" class and spent 10 minutes writing a tool that compiles and evaluates code. The exact same code made it into the production "IDE" and was there for over a decade.
The thing is, there's such an amazing amount of "integration" in the environment, you'd think there was tons of ingenious code written by teams of geniuses, but there isn't. It's just that a lot of unnecessary stuff has been removed and made runtime, so everything is available for you to see and change.
It's one of the best examples of how minimalism can work very well.