The distinction is massive, and why all those Bret Victor demos have nothing to do with Smalltalk. You can record a bit of your program's execution during development.
Interesting, hadn't seen that (have to read it in more detail later). Does sort of remind me of the approach taken to synchronization/managing time for Croquet[1]: Tea time[2] (although the aim there had nothing to do with live programming). Seems like a different need for managing time, but a not entirely dissimilar approach.
Thank you for the references. I've seen some of these before, but connecting the dots can be difficult (meaning, I have to keep going back to them later). A lot of seems to have gone into Kay's new project @ VRPI.
Somewhat tangential (again thanks for the link, and the comments on "live programming"):
"In the Smalltalk model, for instance, state is persistent and code changes don't affect data. In the Clojure model, code is "mostly functional", with a small amount of carefully-managed state. Either model could be a starting point for a system where continuous code changes can be seen as continuous effects."
-- Bret Victor
http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
Right, but no one knows yet which will work (my hunch is a combination). My point was that the experiences he showed weren't Smalltalk experiences; we have finally got a lot of great ideas what to do post smalltalk.
Anyways, this an active research topic...see:
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/211297/managedtime.pdf
If you haven't yet.