I don't understand people today. They seem so brittle and inflexible, unwilling to open their minds and learn. When I was fresh out of university, my only programming experience was with FORTRAN on mainframes. My first job was on the newest technology of the day: DEC PDP-11 <https://www.wikiwand.com/en/PDP-11> . Subsequently, I had jobs working on Tandem NonStop computers (GUARDIAN OS and TAL programming language), Modcomp systems and their assembler, Unix and C, VAX and DCL, AS/400, Windows, Smalltalk and Seaside, Python and web2py, Java and Android, Objective-C and iOS, etc. Each and every job was an exciting, stimulating learning opportunity. It was **fun** diving into unexplored territory. These various environments were quite different from one another. But I had no trouble adapting. The various programming languages had *substantially* different syntaxes. But I wasn't bothered. It took little time for me to get comfortable with each new language. So why is Smalltalk giving people conniptions? Are they really so spoiled? Re: today's IDEs (Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, etc.). The problem isn't that they are so resource-hungry. It's that they're so damn complex. The file-based underpinnings, the "plumbing" if you will, is what have caused the design of these tools to evolve into complex behemoths. When you start with a clean slate, you can design a clean, elegant IDE without compromise. And that's what we have in Pharo. marten wrote

When we switched from VisualWorks/ENVY to C# around 2003 we were surprised to see how bad source code management was in the Microsoft area those days - and asking around in the usual community groups those days made one think very clear: the world is thinking in files and noone will not be able to force these large numbers of developers to change their behaviour. That's the base problem.

But we will also not be able to change these large numbers to Smalltalkers anyway (mostly because it uses "." and NOT ";" or "[","]" instead of "{", "}" - strange, that so many younger programmers have then problems with this syntax - seems to come a monoculture of programmers ).

These days we have git and svn and the quality of tools has improved very, very much - but limitations of the file based process are still there, BUT instead of changing the users: the tools available today (e.g. VisualStudio) do a huge work in the background to give an intelligent view on these files (where .NET is much better here than Java). So the users have their loved files and still have some intelligent repository-like view on the source code - they do not see the difference any more. The drawback of this approach is the huge-memory-demand of these tools - where Smalltalk's memory usage is more or less still there where is was 18 years ago. That's also message.

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