Unfortunately, many people were stuck in the 1960s and 1970s, stuck to file-based programming, stuck to editing long reams of code. And this trope stayed with the IT industry to this day.

Thus, the evolution of software development has been frozen in time. Today's modern IDEs like Visual Studio, IntelliJ and Xcode are merely glorified text editors used to edit long reams of code. Large code bases need to be constantly recompiled. It's positively antediluvian!

Smalltalk views development in the context of an (in-memory) "object database." You never have to recompile the entire code base. You just compile dynamically method by method.

Workspaces are simply an evolved REPL. They're more powerful. And they're a great exploratory tool.

AFAIC, Smalltalk remains the best and most evolved software development environment. It is the future of software engineering created half a century ago!