In Smalltalk, does anyone actually modify the production application live? I would think you'd want to modify the live application in devel, and then copy it over.
At this point, you can either copy over the difference or just replace the whole production application. I'm not sure which would be faster.
I don't think liveness is important for a production system. I prefer production to evolve in discrete chunks. Liveness makes sense for development.
I suppose one other benefit of a live system is that you could deploy an update without without restarting the application. But at some level, you would be restarting part of the application, and you are just shifting the update logic from the networking layer to the function call layer or object layer or whatever minimal layer of swappable component you can deploy.
I barely touched Smalltalk, but I think people value liveness as a feature for the user, not the developer. This is basically ultimate customization: you can change the source code of your local copy.
That sounds insane -- how do versions updates work then? One of the best parts of only allowing customization at well-defined points is that you can upgrade software and it is likely to keep working.
Or is the Smalltalk idea that you never update your software?
At this point, you can either copy over the difference or just replace the whole production application. I'm not sure which would be faster.
I don't think liveness is important for a production system. I prefer production to evolve in discrete chunks. Liveness makes sense for development.
I suppose one other benefit of a live system is that you could deploy an update without without restarting the application. But at some level, you would be restarting part of the application, and you are just shifting the update logic from the networking layer to the function call layer or object layer or whatever minimal layer of swappable component you can deploy.