Hmm, well I don't know exactly when Monticello was first developed, but it was certainly in heavy use by the early 2000s. How is that "meh" when compared to ... cvs & subversion?

I don't know much about the systems used in commercial smalltalks of the 90s, but I'm sure they weren't "meh" either (others more knowledgeable than me about them can chime in).

image-centric development is seductive (I'm guilty). But the main issue isn't "we don't know what code got put where, and by whom". There were sophisticated tools available almost from the get go for that.

Its more a problem of dependencies not being pruned, because someone, somewhere wants to use it. So lots of stuff remained in the "blessed" image (I'm only referring to squeak here) which really ought not to have been in the standard distribution. And because it was there, some other unrelated project further down the line used a class here, a class there.

So when you later realise it needed to be pruned, it wasn't that easy.

But nevertheless, it was still done. Witness cuis.

In other words, it was a cultural problem, not a tooling problem. It's not that squeak had too few ways of persisting & distributing code - it had too many.

IMHO, the main problem was never the image, or lack of tools. It was lack of modularisation. All classes existed in the same global namespace. A clean implementation of modules early on would have been nice.

1988 "An Overview of Modular Smalltalk"

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/62084.62095