And meta programming, which is something that came out of the Lisp community, was also supported of course.

were all things that it supported out of the box. Refactoring, introspection, reflection etc. Smalltalk was very clever about exposing its internals to developers. It came with a class hierarchy browser as well. This came straight out of the first research papers on refactoring. It had a refactoring browser, which was a tool that allowed you to restructure the code. Smalltalk programs were stored in a database. The author mentions Intellij but fails to note the history of Eclipse which, via IBM's Visual Age, you can actually trace back all the way to Smalltalk, which arguably had one of the first modern IDEs three decades ago. It's not a new approach but actually a very old one. It's better than the legacy behavior, where the IDE loads context for all things up front before freeing up the UI (which would mean 10+ minute IDE loading screens for some users).

Most failed, and the one that stuck (which I worked on for a bit, yay!) still has some weird issues with the experience where an end-user 'knows what they want' and get bothered by the fact that stuff is still getting initialized, and they may or may not get what they want in a completion list. It's not written about anywhere, but there is a long and storied history of trying different takes on 'IDE Incrementality' for the Visual Studio IDE, all in service of making it a more palatable experience for people working in utterly massive codebases. With sufficient human suffering thrown at the problem, you can approximate decent incrementality, but it ain't easy. The biggest challenge with incrementality in the IDE (I'm not even talking about incremental parsing or whatever) is you're subject to the whims of a given language's build system and how it behaves on multi-million LoC codebases.

Java files saving as jetbrains webstorm