Why do we still program with flat files? [closed]

Solution 1:

• you can diff them
• you can merge them
• anyone can edit them
• they are simple and easy to deal with
• they are universally accessible to thousands of tools

Solution 2:

In my opinion, any possible benefits are outweighed by being tied to a particular tool.

With plain-text source (that seems to be what you're discussing, rather than flat files per se) I can paste chunks into an email, use simple version control systems (very important!), write code into comments on Stack Overflow, use one of a thousand text editors on any number of platforms, etc.

With some binary representation of code, I need to use a specialized editor to view or edit it. Even if a text-based representation can be produced, you can't trivially roll back changes into the canonical version.

Solution 3:

Smalltalk is an image-based environment. You are no longer working with code in a file on disk. You are working with and modifying the real objects in runtime. It still is text but classes are not stored in human readable files. Instead the whole object memory (the image) is stored on a file in binary format.

But the biggest complaints of those trying out smalltalk is because it doesn't use files. Most of the file-based tools that we have (vim, emacs, eclipse, vs.net, unix tools) will have to be abandoned in favor of smalltalk's own tools. Not that the tools provided in smalltalk in inferior. It is just different.