Chapter 1. The Big Picture
The typical relationship between the programmer and the programming environment is one where the environment nurtures the programmer. In return for this support, the programmer works within the constraints created by the environment.
In the early seventies, Smalltalk was written with a different philosophy. Every user of every application was considered a potential programmer. The classic example is, you could be editing a document and decide you didn't like how the editor worked. Pressing a button would show you the inner workings of the document editor and provide you with tools to change the editor's behavior.
User-as-programmer may seem far-fetched, but Smalltalk saw many cases where non-programming professionals wrote ...
Get Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
