Do Smalltalk IDEs really not have the concept of different "views" of the code? The 4-pane hiearchical view is clearly valuable, but why would it need to be "surpassed" rather than complemented by other views that are available when needed and can be switched to or even shown alongside the traditional view?

If that kind of thing doesn't exist (and the article sure sounds like that), then yes, it appears the smalltalk ecosystem really has fallen decades behind the state of the art in the IDE area.

Historically, Smalltalk has many browsers (views). This System Browser is one of many browsers, and the most busy-looking.

You can browse within it, and also spawn off other kinds of browsers from it.

And these browsers are extensible with others. As someone new to Smalltalk, I was pretty easily able to add a visual class hierarchy browser into this environment:

https://www.neilvandyke.org/smalltalk-chg/

Half the things we know or think about in HCI, the people at PARC figured out before we were born, and sometimes before the hardware to test it existed.

https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

They have many views, the trouble is the proliferation of these views as you go through the code. You browse to a class and method, then you want to see the senders, and so you open that, and then see the implementors of a method a sender calls, and so on.

https://blog.lorenzano.eu/content/images/2026/01/Pasted-imag...