Judging by the tag cloud on his blog, Rick works mainly in the Microsoft end of the enterprisey world. If VisualStudio is the main front end to your system then I can see why the question would arise. Of course, in other parts of the IT world programs stopped being in flat files a long time ago. Or even never were. But you have to go looking for that world. As luck would have it, Gilad Bracha has just recently explained some of the very pleasant aspects of that world. But so many programmers either don't know it exists, or once shown it refuse to enter.
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Rick Minerich asks the question "Why are our programs still represented by flat files?" To which my answer is "not all of them are."
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Hi Keith,
You make a good point. In my head I was asking the question more of mainstrem, widely used, languages.
Admittedly, I know of smalltalk mostly from others. I've only fiddled with it a little bit.
Smalltalk is a great language but the runtime environment is heavy and unwieldy. The demand for Smalltalk components is small. It seems to me, in general, not well suited for business and wide deployment.
Cheers,
-Rick Minerich
So, we have an interesting datapoint. Smalltalk is almost exactly what you propose that a programming environment might be like, but you find it "heavy and unwieldy" What does this tell us?.
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