Scratch

Hi Eric,

Scratch is developed within Squeak using Squeak's tools. Almost every Smalltalk implementation (except GNU Smalltalk and a new Eclipse-based ST by IBM) is image based and requires you to use its own editing tools. This, however, should not be a limiting experience, because those tools are extremely powerful and scaleable (in fact, Eclipse came out of these Smalltalk tools). Besides, you can open as many editors as you like (in Smalltalk the main editing tool is the SystemBrowsers - well, mine is the Debugger    ). And, you can simultaneously change anything and everything in each open window, be it Debuggers, SystemBrowsers, Workspaces, Transcripts, ChangeSorters etc (!) As soon as you change something in any of the Smalltalk tools, this part of the image is instantly updated in every other view (because, you know what's coming, MVC originated in Smalltalk).

Also, in Smalltalk you don't really have "Source Code" in the sense of a set of external files which need to be compiled and linked into an executable before "runtime". Instead, You modify a live image and there are methods to share those modifications (changesets) with others. It's still pretty alien to many conventional programmers, but also an intoxicating way of programming to many others.