IDEs such as Eclipse have gained a lot of users in the past by taking ideas from Smalltalk IDEs - incremental compilation and local version management being just a few of them. But one area where Smalltalk IDEs (or editors such as Emacs) still have an edge is automation of the IDE itself: scripting tedious tasks in the IDE. Where Smalltalk users just use Smalltalk to access IDE objects, Emacs users use LISP to do the same - and can do that interactively and at runtime.
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