Xerox PARC systems were great and it is a pity that the mainstream didn't adopt them as such, only a few pieces.
Every time I dig into their archives I come out marvelled with how programming might have felt in those Workstations. Memory safe programming languages for the whole stack (+ Assembly of course), automatic memory management, OS wide REPL, visual debuggers, code correction, modular systems...
Specially since Smalltalk and Oberon (Native and BlueBottle) allowed me to have a glimpse of it.
Yep. The standard we accept for what constitutes a "workable" development environment has essentially trended towards "what is the crappiest workflow that can be tolerated by a professional programmer working 40 hours per week on it".
There's no real incentive to market programming tools that have a higher standard for usability, because there's no ecosystem of sensible "there is consensus that this should be a a thing and this is a sane way to do it" programming tools, so you can't work at that level anyway. Someday there will be a market again for sane development environments but right now everyone just powers through the learning process until they get to the level of "my mind is warped enough that I can comprehend a build file this evil" level because that's where the money is at anyway. It's a chicken and egg problem. No ecosystem no market.
It's just an accident of history that such a thing ever existed in the first place. A waypoint on the way to the era of industrial mindfuck programming.
Every time I dig into their archives I come out marvelled with how programming might have felt in those Workstations. Memory safe programming languages for the whole stack (+ Assembly of course), automatic memory management, OS wide REPL, visual debuggers, code correction, modular systems...
Specially since Smalltalk and Oberon (Native and BlueBottle) allowed me to have a glimpse of it.