The hypothesis we put forward is that the primary job of the environment is to help us construct, consume and share many narratives with and about our systems. This led us to create a new kind of a development experience. We made every object be able to tell stories through custom views and actions. We made it possible for each object to know how to search itself. We made the debugger change its shape whenever there is an interesting event on the stack. We made the editor be able to adapt to the code we are writing. We bridge the gap between coding and documentation through examples (tests that return objects). We created live documents out of all these.
See The I in IDE
Edsger W. Dijkstra, the Dutch computing scientist, promoted the development of a program as if it were a proof. He used the notion of the Weakest Precondition (WP) as a mechanism to keep track of your work.
> I was touched by the way WP guided the development of programs. I sought the feel in my Smalltalk work, always moving by small steps thought through and demonstrated by example in a Workspace. Later I saved examples so the experience could be relived. See Automated Testing