Have you ever looked at Smalltalk? We've had that kind of behavior in Smalltalk for decades - without any of the restrictions you see in Java. take a look; I think you'll be leasantly surprised
He isn't talking about the language, he's talking about the IDE. IIRC, smalltalk is loosly typed and perhaps he wants a strong typed language, perhaps he likes C# and VB.NET. IntelliJ is indeed one of the most beautiful tools I've ever seen and clearly shows that VS.NET is just lightyears behind. Whidbey will solve a lot, but not all. And that's disturbing.
There are several Smalltalkers in IDEA team. Of course Smalltalk IDE's is one of the inspiration sources for them.
Btw, IDEA doesn't have my fav 'Move to component' refactoring.
Frans, Smalltalk is strongly typed language. Don't confuse strong with static typing.
Frans,
James IS talking about the Smalltalk IDE. Edit and continue is not a feature of the Smalltalk language, but of the IDE, which happens to be written in Smalltalk.
Java does have some nice IDEs. I use Eclipse and it's great, for a Java IDE. It almost makes Java worth using. Eclipse barely begins to do some of the things I can do in Smalltalk, but it's gigantic and slow. Smalltalk does everything Eclipse+Java does and more, but you can run Smalltalk on an old 286 with a couple of megabytes of RAM and it feels snappy. Way back in 1990 I used to keep a copy of Smalltalk on a floppy disk and carry it around with me in my pocket.
"make like internet explorer to blow away this new "Netscape"."
you mean by giving VS.NET away for free and bundling it into Windows? ;-)
As much as I would love VS.NET to incorporate features from IDEA btw, the last thing I want is for JetBrains to be "blown away". We need companies other than Microsoft to provide innovative products and a fresh perspective. Competition is good - it keeps companies on their toes and forces them to keep up.
Btw - JetBrains is working on a VS.NET plugin to bring many of the IDEA features to the C# masses. Considering IDEA itself started off as a JBuilder plugin, this might just evolve into a full-fledged C# IDE at some point...