Patrick Logan points to an MSDN article containing this quote:
It seems clear that the file is a relic that has outlived its usefulness for software development.
WTF?? What a great idea: Let’s replace something that has been proven to work in an interoperable way between a multitude of different implementations with some half-assed API-driven magic … er … why do I suddenly feel that someone, somewhere, will start to giggle with girlish glee while reading this?
;-)
I just thought of IBM’s VisualAge for Java. There always seemed to be to much trouble lurking in the way the did things and I lost my Workspace more than once. Whenever you changed a thing it was compiled immediately and the results reflected in the IDE. There were people around who regarded this behaviour to be essential for their productivity.
Yes, Visual Age cured me of the idea that moving away from files was a good thing, too. It’s simply a pain to integrate tools, and there’s such an impossible number of them that’ll work on a file basis — there’s simply no way that could be replicated based on a more specific API.
This strongly reminded me of Smalltalk in general and Squeek in paticular.
Forth also alows you to keep adding to some image where ever more words that build upon one another make it grow into your application. There are current successors like Slava Pestov’s Factor.
Due to the inherent danger of being left with nothing but a broken binary, you kept the sources around in files though.